the place where you dream
by between-yourself-and-me
Summary: When word comes from New York City that her estranged mother has attempted suicide, Alyssa Gardner's ordinary life is turned inside out as she's sucked into a world of dreams and madness, where nothing is as it seems and Alyssa herself is but a pawn in the game. Welcome to Wonderland.
1. the dream comes like a knife

**AN:** This story is a **crossover** with the musical _Wonderland: A New Alice_.Though the story follows, with slight divergences, the basic outlines of _Splintered's_ plot, it's set in the universe of the musical (and will intersect with the plot of the same). Knowledge of the musical is _**not**_ a requirement to read/understand what's going on—the story will explain itself.

For the first few chapters, expect it read as a more or less straightforward point-of-divergence AU of _Splintered_ in which Alison, rather than consigning herself to Soul's Asylum, elects to divorce her husband and move far away from her family instead. Once we get to Wonderland, however, things will change _dramatically._

Reviews are greatly appreciated.

* * *

 **ONE.** _THE DREAM COMES LIKE A KNIFE._

Alyssa Gardner soars.

Knees tucked, the board leveling out under her feet as she maneuvers for landing—and then her foot slips and the concrete bowl of the skatepark rushes up—

 _"FUCK!"_

She rolls to a stop a second later, sucking in air as pain hammers into her knee. Another skateboarder curves to a halt a few feet away while Alyssa groans, reflexively curling around her injured knee. "Jesus _fuck_ —"

"You okay, Gardner?" the other skater says, stepping off his board—Hitch. She'd recognize that languid drawl anywhere, even with involuntary tears blurring her vision. He scoops up his board and then hers, coming to squat in front of her face. "That looked pretty nasty."

"You think?" Alyssa manages a shaky laugh as she gets her breath back and pushes off the concrete. Her skid down the bowl must've severed her kneepad's band, because it's nowhere to be seen and her leggings are shredded around the bloody mess of her knee; it feels like someone jammed a crowbar under her kneecap and _yanked._ "God. Should've bailed, shouldn't I?"

"Maybe," Hitch says amiably. "But, hey—your pop was pretty great. You want a hand?"

"Make it a shoulder."

With a grin, he tucks both of their boards under one arm and leans down to brace his other shoulder under hers. "Ready? One—two— _aaaaand_ up you go."

Putting the slightest weight on her left foot sends shooting pain through her knee, but with Hitch's support and a lot of awkward hopping she's able to hobble out of the bowl. He stinks like weed and stale pizza, a smell as much a fixture of Underland as the blacklights and and tinny classic rock pumping out of the speakers; Hitch has worked here since the day it opened two years ago, as an attendant and occasional skateboarding instructor, and he haunts the place even on his days off—like today.

Three on-duty attendants are already blading towards them, headlamps bobbling with their movements and their neon-orange employee vests blazing under the blacklights. "Blowout at twelve o'clock, gents," Hitch says, as they plow to a stop one by one and he helps Alyssa onto one of the benches scattered around the skatepark. "And where in hell were you? Maybe snooze on the clock, next time."

"We'll take it from here, man."

Alyssa rolls her eyes as Jebidiah Holt blades up in a yellow manager's vest. His voice is a deep, familiar rumble heavy with anger; he's never gotten along with Hitch, whose rough-edged reputation triggers his _protective-older-brother_ mode something fierce. It's only gotten worse since Hitch took over teaching her skateboarding class a few months ago. They're up to four _I'll kick his ass if he messes with you_ s now, by Alyssa's tally.

"Sure," Hitch says, unconcerned. He taps a knuckle against Alyssa's shoulder as he sets her board down at her feet; she can _hear_ Jeb grinding his teeth. "Don't try slamming it down next time. Just let it land."

"Right."

"Later, Gardner." He drops his own board and pushes off with it all in a single, smooth motion—he's more at ease on a board than Alyssa is _walking,_ sometimes.

Jeb scowls after him while the other attendants break out the first aid kit for her knee. "I've told you not to—"

"Yeah, yeah," Alyssa mutters, unclipping her helmet so she can rifle her fingers through her hair. The last thing she wants right now is another pointless lecture on how she shouldn't get mixed up with _nineteen-year-old weed-smoking deadbeats like Mitchell Hirsch_. As if she doesn't already know better—and it isn't like _Hitch_ has any interest in _her,_ either.

For a second, she can tell Jeb's weighing whether to push the issue or not; then he deflates with an exasperated sigh and takes a seat beside her. "So, you talking to me again?"

"No."

That answer seems to surprise him. He's quiet for a while, while the attendants finish bandaging up her knee. Alyssa isn't sure why he's so taken aback; it's only been a few days since her dad took Jeb to dinner so Jeb could convince him to greenlight Alyssa's plan to study abroad in London for senior year—she'd thought, anyway. What had really happened was the two of them deciding it wasn't gonna happen. _Too dangerous, not the right time, just want what's best for you, Al…_

Bullshit.

They'd had it all planned out, her and Jeb—the study abroad program would've coincided with his first year at the University of Arts London, and together they'd figured out a schedule to visit every single art museum in the city during the weekends. She'd been _pumped._ And then…

Smoldering rage flares in her chest all over again. She grabs her board and gets stiffly to her feet; her knee throbs when she puts weight on the leg, but she's pissed enough to not care much as she limps toward the exit.

"Hey…! Hey—Al!" Jeb catches up with her in an instant, gliding into her path and crouching lower than he needs to when he brakes, bringing his eyes level with hers. His face is dusky-purple under the blacklight, and the glow of his headlamp in her eyes obscures the details of his features. "Look, all I want is for you to be safe."

"Get out of my way," Alyssa snaps.

"Really—" He grabs her arms, firm but gentle, and a little jolt flips through her belly when his palms brush the bare skin of her biceps. "Listen, Al, I know how excited you were about London, but… the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad idea—I mean—"

"It wasn't your decision!"

"C'mon, Al," he says. "I don't think you've really thought through what it'd mean, living so far away from your dad for a whole year… alone. With no one to look after you."

"I thought _plenty,_ " Alyssa mutters. His hands feel nice against her arms, but she's in no mood to enjoy it; she shrugs, shaking him off. "You'd better get back to work. Wouldn't want another blowout going unnoticed on your watch, right?"

She makes to step past him, but he steps, too, mirroring her move. "I'll clock out," he says. "You need someone to drive you home."

"I'm fine to drive."

"Not with that knee."

"It's just a _scrape,_ Jeb—I'll be fine."

Frustrated silence descends between them, neither willing to budge.

Her cell rings, a high trill muffled by the the band that secures it above her elbow. Alyssa turns away as she digs it out, grateful for the distraction. It's one of the ancient, indestructible variety, scuffed and scratched from years of use; she flips it open and jams her finger into her other ear to blot out the background noise. "'lo?"

"Hey, Butterfly…"

Dad's voice, more upset than she's heard in years. Alyssa stands a little straighter, alarmed. "Dad? What's up?"

A sharp breath frizzes through the line. "It's your mother," he says. "Something… something's happened."

And all the air in Underland's vast, retrofitted salt dome seems to freeze.

The last time Alyssa saw her mother, she'd been five years old and in the hospital with both hands swathed in bandages because Alison Gardner had slashed open her palms with a pair of garden shears—she has vague memories of Alison's pale blue, bloodshot eyes, of a whispered apology, of tears on her mother's cheeks. And then Alison had gone home, packed herself a suitcase, and walked out of their lives forever; the only connection they have now is the monthly alimony payments Alison sends from her new home in New York. And now—

" _What_ something?" It comes out harsher than she intends. Dad tells her all the time that it's not _really_ Alison's fault, what happened—that Alison lost it and went berserk on the daffodils in the garden, that the sight of blood gushing from Alyssa's hands had been what snapped Alison out of it, that her decision to leave them stemmed from her fear of hurting Alyssa again—but…

"Butterfly, she—she's in intensive care right now. She stepped in front of a bus."

Alyssa blinks. The words don't sound _real,_ like Dad's just describing the plot twist in a television show and not—what, her mother's attempted suicide? a terrible accident? "H—how do you know?"

"The hospital called," he says. "Apparently I'm still the emergency contact in her medical records. I… they'd like us to go there, in case—just in case." Alyssa can hear him swallowing over the phone, knows how this must be killing him—even after eleven years, even after she left without a word, he's still in love with the woman he married. It's why there's still pictures of her in their living room, why he's never even _tried_ to date someone new…

She shakes her head, struggling to make sense of it all. "I have school."

"Just over the weekend," he says, a little desperate now. "She—she might not…" His voice hitches. "Please, Butterfly."

"…Okay. Okay, I'll—I'm coming home now, okay, Dad?" Alyssa shoots a panicked glance over her shoulder at Jeb, who's already shrugging out of his manager's vest and bending to unlace his rollerblades. By the time she's finished saying goodbye, Jeb's standing in just his socks, watching her anxiously.

"What happened?"

"Alison's… in trouble," Alyssa says.

"Your mom?"

She leans on the arm he offers her as she hobbles toward the exit. "Yeah. Dad wants to to fly to New York, see her in the hospital. I gotta…"

The reality of it doesn't hit until they've reached the doors to Underland's parking lot—a gust of warm air rushes over her face as they emerge into the blazing Texas sunlight, and something clicks into place in her mind. _We're going to New York because Alison might die. Alison. My mom._

Her mom, who left; her mom, whom she hasn't seen in eleven long years—but still. Her _mom._

Her heart pounds.

 _One last chance to say goodbye._


	2. perfect mother, perfect wife

**TWO.** _PERFECT MOTHER, PERFECT WIFE._

There's not much to see at North Central Bronx Hospital; by the time they arrive, Alison is in serious but stable condition, hooked up to an array of monitors and a machine that breathes for her, too bleary with morphine to notice the arrival of her ex-husband and daughter. She looks smaller than she does in Alyssa's memory, her pale blonde hair struck through with grey and her face thin and haggard, one side turned to mincemeat by road rash.

Impact with the bus had shattered her hip and snapped three of her ribs, one of which had bent inward to puncture a lung; then it flung her onto the street like a ragdoll, the doctors had said, fracturing the other hip and leaving an egg the size of Alyssa's fist on the side of her head. Concussion. She'd been bleeding inside when paramedics rushed her to the hospital; while Alyssa and her dad were boarding their emergency flight to La Guardia, Alison had been undergoing blood transfusions and surgery to stop her from bleeding to death.

Now, there's nothing to do but wait and see.

Dad pulls one of the grey visitor's chairs up to her bedside and collapses into it like a deflating sack of flour, exhaustion and worry carving deep lines into his face. For a few minutes, Alyssa hovers awkwardly at his shoulder, uncertain of herself. She spent the whole flight anxious to get here; now, with Alison glazed and barely aware of their presence at her side, Alyssa finds she can't wait to leave. It's just—too much.

She taps Dad's shoulder, ignoring the twinge of guilt as she does so. "I'm gonna—uh, cafeteria," she says weakly.

"Oh."

"I could bring you coffee, maybe? Or something?"

He shakes his head, slow like he's moving through water. "No—that's alright. I'll just… Come back when you can."

It's a relief to escape into the hospital's drab hallways; they're not empty, exactly, but everyone she passes out here is too occupied with their own problems to pay attention to her as she follows the signs back to the waiting room.

Hunger leads Alyssa to the hospital's cafe, whose counters sport shrink-wrapped muffins and pre-made salads, boxed in clear plastic and very overpriced. She orders herself a spinach pie and retreats, fiddling with her visitor's pass while she waits. Her cell buzzes twice from inside her backpack; Alyssa digs it out at once, relieved to have something to _do_.

 ** _[ from:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _hows your mom_

Biting her lip, she types out a response.

 ** _[ to:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _idk. better? but not good._

Better: not dying, not bleeding out, scheduled for more surgeries throughout the week. About as much as you could hope for a couple days after getting hit by a bus, right? And they've her pumped full of so many meds that she's probably not even hurting.

But that doesn't change the brokenness of Alison's body, the months or maybe _years_ of painful recovery she could look forward to, or the reality of her mother having charged into rush hour traffic on purpose.

 _Mania,_ Dad had told her. In all likelihood Alison hadn't been chasing some fucked up death wish but instead believed, for a few critical seconds, in her own invincibility. A similar state had killed Alyssa's maternal grandmother, who took a running leap out of an eighth story window just to prove she could fly.

She couldn't.

The guy behind the counter calls her name, and Alyssa hurries to collect her spinach pie and sit down; when she glances at her phone again, there's another text from Jen filling its screen.

 ** _[ from:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _:( what abt u? you okay?_

 ** _[ to:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _it just feels weird. i dont even know her._

That's what it comes down to, really, Alyssa thinks as she spears the pie with her fork and a plume of steam rises from within; in an abstract sense, her mother coming within minutes of death and still not being out of danger yet makes her feel almost sick to her stomach with fear. But the woman in that hospital bed is a stranger. The handful of hazy toddler's memories Alyssa has of her are up against eleven years of radio silence, and she can't make the character in her dad's wistful stories match up with the real Alison.

It's all so confusing.

 ** _[ to:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _idk._

"Ex—Excuse me."

Alyssa looks up, startled. A woman stands at the other side of the table—sort of a more frazzled version of Ms. Frizzle, minus the thematic patterning on her simple red dress and plus a very tall coffee. She wears a hesitant, awkward little smile, and Alyssa isn't sure whether she's about to be apologetically told off for the shortness of her fluffy blue skirt or asked if she'd like to sign a petition for something-or-other. Before she can ask, the woman clears her throat and says, "Uh… hi. Uh, this is weird to ask, I know, but—are you Alyssa Gardner?"

 _…What?_

She leans slowly back in her seat, folding her arms, wary. "You know me?"

The woman releases a hard breath, like she's relieved she got the right girl. "Well, no, not _really,_ but—god, sorry, let me…" She bats a wayward curl away from her eyes, looking sheepish. "I'm Alice. Alice Stetson," she says. "I know your mom. She lives down the hall from us, and I know… what happened, and the—the guy called you Alyssa, and then I thought… well, you look like her, you know?"

Her phone buzzes again, making Alyssa's fingers tingle where she's gripping it. She's not sure how she's supposed to respond to… to _this,_ to the idea that Alison legged it halfway across the country and settled down and had a _life,_ had friends—or neighbors, anyway—and told them all about the kid she'd left behind…

 _What would she even have to tell?_

"That's. Um. Wow," Alyssa manages. "So—uh, so you're here to visit her…?"

"Actually, no," Alice says as she pulls out the chair opposite Alyssa's and sits, slowly. "My daughter's having an appendectomy. I'm just waiting for her to get out of surgery."

"Oh."

"Mmhm." The look in her eyes isn't quite sympathy, Alyssa decides. It's something else, softer and less pitying. She picks at her half-eaten spinach pie as an alternative to meeting that dark-brown and terribly _kind_ gaze, wondering what Alison could possibly have said about her.

Stories about Alyssa as a toddler? Wishful thinking about the teenager she'd become?

Had Alison told her that she hadn't even bothered to tell Dad she was leaving, that he didn't know until the divorce papers came in the mail? Does Alice know about the ugly scars on Alyssa's palms, where they'd come from, the violent unravelling of a once-happy family?

She's not sure how to ask. Not sure if she really wants to know.

"So you know Alison," she says instead, twirling her fork through the crust of her pie.

"Yeah. She moved in down the hall a couple years ago. It's not far from here, just down Bainbridge Avenue a ways… She and I kinda hit it off over _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland._ Did you know she's got a facsimile edition of _Alice's Adventures Under Ground_ from _1886?_ In incredible condition? Apparently it's been in her family for three generations—"

" _Alice_ in Wonderland? Really?"

Alice ducks into her coffee, sheepish again. "I know, I _know_ —but those books were really special to me when I was little. My dad used to… And they were to your mom, too, you know. She's _also_ got an old copy of _Alice_ with 'Alison' scribbled over every instance of Alice's name, so…" She shakes her head, some of the light going out of her eyes. "…Anyway I, uh, I understand you and her don't… talk much."

Alyssa shrugs. _Try at all._

But that's not the kind of thing she's dying to talk about with near-total strangers, so she stalls by flipping open her phone.

 ** _[ from:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _u can call me any time, al. jeb too we're here 4 u. 3_

"…I guess not," Alyssa mutters.

"She talked _about_ you a lot," Alice says. "Your dad sent her copies of all your school pictures; she's got them all lined up on her fridge, and some clippings from when your mosaics won ribbons at fair… I-I-I don't… know why she never tried to contact _you,_ but she's really proud of you."

 ** _[ to:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _thanks j 3_

Her thumb hovers over the _Send_ button. She typed the response out on autopilot while Alice's words seared into her brain; in all the possibilities Alyssa has imagined over the years, she'd never thought that Alison might secretly keep tabs on her. If she'd wanted to still be part of Alyssa's life, she would've written or called or _something;_ and since she didn't, Alyssa always figured that she just _didn't care_. Like she'd decided to eject wholesale, a clean break, no regrets and no looking back.

 _Send._

"I don't get it," she says flatly, looking up at Alice, who has both hands wrapped around her coffee and is staring Alyssa down with that intently kind expression again. "I mean—I mean, what kind of mom _does_ that?"

Just walks out on their kid, no contact, stalking from afar?

Alice shrugs, cradling her coffee close. "Maybe a scared one?"

"Maybe," Alyssa says, not believing.

Something in the depths of Alice's knit hobo bag beeps, and Alice almost fumbles her coffee in her haste to dig it out. After a moment's frantic rummaging, she emerges victorious with a Blackberry—and immediately leaps up like she's been stung. "Ah—gotta go," she says, scooping the bag back onto her shoulder. "Chloe just got out of surgery, I'm gonna go—gonna meet her in the recovery room, you know. Be there when she wakes up." A fleeting smile touches her face. "Give my best to your mom, okay? And, Alyssa—it was nice meeting you."

"Sure," Alyssa says.

Another smile, and Alice zips out of the cafe, leaving Alyssa alone with her half-eaten spinach pie.

She and Dad check into a motel as close to the hospital as Dad could find—a dingy little two-story place across the street from an elevated subway track. Their room isn't a _room_ so much as a box with a pair of rock-hard twin beds crammed inside and a bathroom so tiny Alyssa's outstretched arms could brush two of its walls at once. Dad's in there now while Alyssa sprawls on her bed, flipping through a brochure she'd snagged on their way out of the hospital.

 _…People with bipolar disorder go through unusual mood changes…_

 _…It often starts in a person's late teen or early adult years…_

 _…However, it is important to know that just because someone in your family has bipolar disorder, it does not mean other members of the family will…_

 _…Mood episodes are intense…_

 _…People with mania and psychotic symptoms may believe they are rich and famous, or have special powers…_

The rumble of the shower cuts off, and Alyssa folds the pamphlet closed, rolling her head back to study the ceiling instead. Little air bubbles cover the plaster like warts on a toad. She tries to imagine them connected, strung together into constellations, but she can't wrangle her thoughts into order for long enough to manage it. Her mind keeps wandering to the brochure, to Alison's mania.

Bipolar disorder had never interested her much, before. What was the point, with Alison nothing but a distant memory?

But it's eating at her now, the nagging question of what it feels like to jump in front of a bus believing it won't, _can't,_ hurt you. To not only _believe_ it can't hurt you but to be gripped with the feverish, compulsive need to _prove_ it. That's something the dry, clinical tone of the brochure can't help her understand.

Her phone, lying next to her on the austere blue-grey bedspread, buzzes twice.

 ** _[ from:_** Persephone. ** _] →_** _Hey, Alyssa. Closing shop & thinking of you. How you doing?_

Fondness swells in her chest. Persephone is normally pretty laconic; Alyssa often goes through entire shifts at Butterfly Threads without exchanging more than a _hello_ and _goodbye_ with her boss, and whenever Persephone retreats into the back room to patch up whatever treasures she dug up during her weekly scavenging, she's so quiet it's easy to forget there's anyone else there at all. Nearly a dozen words all at once speaks volumes for her concern.

 ** _[ to:_** Persephone. ** _] →_** _Thanks, Perse. I'm okay. Docs say Alisons improving. Missed you & Jen today - sorry for bailing on my shift._

As she presses _Send,_ the bathroom door swings open and Dad emerges, dressed in sweats and a faded Queen t-shirt, rumpling his wet hair with a towel. "All yours, Butterfly," he says, dropping onto the mattress and flashing her a quick, crooked smile. "It's a bit on the lukewarm side, but the water pressure ain't bad."

"I'll pass," Alyssa says, and then, "Dad…"

"Hm?"

"What's the point of all this?"

She waves a hand to encompass the hotel, the phenomenal roar of the train passing outside, the cluttered seething _crowded_ mass of the city. The hospital. Alison. Dad stares back at her, dropping the towel into his lap, looking just… sad.

 _Bzz-bzz._

Her fingers curl reflexively around the blocky, curved edge of her phone.

"Butterfly…"

"It's not like she's coming back, right?" Alyssa says, fixing her gaze firmly on the black-and-purple stripes of her leggings. Her left knee is still a bit larger and rounder than the other, although the swelling's receded to the point that it mostly just feels _stiff,_ not painful. "She's not—I mean, we're flying home tomorrow night and probably never going to hear from her ever again, so, so why even bother?"

Quietly, Dad says, "They had her on Haldol because she was agitated before we arrived, and together with the morphine it made her extra drowsy… Dr. Carter said they're adjusting her dosages and she should be more awake tomorrow. We'll be able to talk to her then."

 _If she even wants to talk to us._

Scowling, she flips open her phone.

 ** _[ from:_** Persephone. ** _] →_** _No apology needed; emergencies happen. Take care of yourself._

Alyssa blinks, and her eyes are suddenly swimming with tears. It's all piling up in her head, eleven years of loss and Alison small and broken in a hospital bed, and Alice Stetson sitting around in a hospital waiting to be there when her daughter came out of the anesthetic and recognizing Alyssa just from some stupid school photo she glimpsed on Alison's refrigerator, and the weight and noise and _smell_ of this city so different from the hot dry plains she's used to in Pleasance—

Dad's there, drawing an arm around her shoulders to pull her in against his chest, the way he used to when Alyssa was little and scared of thunder. She sniffles into his shirt.

"Today was hard," he says, his rough baritone vibrating her nose. "For both of us. I was thinking the same thing, you know, seeing her like that." He sighs. "But she's still your mom, and still my… Still the woman I married and swore to love all my life. And tomorrow will be better."

"Promise?"

She doesn't have to lift her head to see him smile; she knows it, feels the warmth of it right to the bone. "I promise, Butterfly. Okay?"

"Okay." Shuddering tearily, Alyssa works an arm around his back, hugging him in return. "Thanks, Dad."

Tomorrow. Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.


	3. your future's in your past

**THREE.** _YOUR FUTURE'S IN YOUR PAST._

Swirling silver fog clutches her. Cold damp fingers. The wet breath of some monstrous creature of ice; above, bruised clouds and the distant drumming of thunder. Something oily black prowls the storm, ever shrouded by mist, indistinct but, she knows, malicious. _Run,_ but marshy ground twists and turns beneath her feet. Running in circles. Running hard just to stay in place and her lungs burn from the effort

headlights diamond-white hurtling toward her, agonized wail of a bus horn—

—which turns inside-out and becomes the mundane note of the train across the street as her flinch yanks her awake. Alyssa stares down the crinkled swell of her pillow case as the train rushes by, the clatter of speeding metal deepening and fading as the train passes the hotel and continues on into the depths of the city. When it's quiet again, and her heart has settled into its usual rhythm, she lifts her head to check the clock on the tiny end table crammed between her bed and Dad's.

It's a few minutes to seven.

 _5:53,_ Pleasance time. Alyssa swallows a groan and shuffles out from under the covers. It's hot, and kind of sticky, muddy darkness just beginning to give way to morning; Alyssa fumbles through it into the bathroom. Crawls under a stream of cool water until she feels less groggy, less like the insides of her eyelids have been coated in sandpaper.

Dad's still snoring, almost as loud as the train, when she emerges. She squeezes around the foot of his bed to retrieve her suitcase, which she manhandles over to her bed and props open on the mattress. The one nice thing about travel, she thinks, is you've chosen all your outfits in advance—no dithering in front of the closet paralyzed by your abundance of choices. _Hashtag first world problems._

She's pink, today. She has fuzzy memories of Dad telling her pink was Alison's favorite, and in the whirl of packing she'd thought it might be… nice, for Alison, seeing a bit of her favorite color in the bland off-white of the hospital. And maybe it will be, assuming Alison's even awake enough to notice them today.

Once she's dressed, Alyssa digs her sketchbook out of her bag and settles cross-legged on the foot of her bed, the weak pre-dawn light just catching the page as it falls through the window. Paper and pencil aren't her medium of choice; her mosaics at home are built of insects and flotsam she finds drifting down Pleasance's windblown streets. One man's trash, another girl's muse…

But here, in this city, she has only an H2 and a smudgy eraser with which to set down the outlines of her dream; she makes do.

Alyssa always draws her dreams, and the nightmares in particular. Twisted things, haunted by malevolent creatures whose form she can never quite decipher but whose hunting cries chill her blood. Tonight's oncoming bus is a new variation on the theme, monster of steel and light rather than flesh… but monster nonetheless.

When she gets home she'll fill in the fog with tissue paper and gauze, shape the snarling thunderheads with black field crickets and crab spiders, and the headlights… Maybe glass. Maybe she'll get Jeb to help her wire in some LEDs behind them, make them glow.

She'll call it _portrait of a mother_ , she thinks, and right away feels guilty.

Alison is better, and worse. Better because when they walk in a few hours later she rolls her head around and looks at them with a sharp, icy lucidity— _worse_ because, now she isn't high out of her mind, there's lines of pain carved deep in her face. Furrowed brows. Mouth tight and hard even as she tries to smile with the side of her face that isn't torn to pieces.

Her voice is a tiny creak as she greets them, and Alyssa hangs back in the doorway while Dad moves closer, murmuring about how worried they've been. Alison chuckles weakly, whispers, "Stupid of me. Just went off my Lithium, Tommy, you didn't need to come all this way just to—"

"I met your friend yesterday," Alyssa says, too loudly.

"My—friend?"

They're both looking at her, Dad's brows furrowed in confusion and Alison's eyes bright and wide with an emotion Alyssa can't place.

"Yeah. Alice." She can't help the trickle of venom into her voice when she adds, "Waiting for her daughter to get her appendix taken out." _You know, like real mothers do—_

"Butterfly," Dad says.

"Alice…" It's like watching a light go out in Alison's expression, her attention turning inward to some dark and troubling thoughts. Alyssa edges closer to her bed, unnerved.

"She—uh, she said to give you her best," she says.

Alison abruptly refocuses, her gaze piercing. "I see," she says. "Well. Yes. I'll thank her, later. I…" She takes a deep breath and then grimaces, her hands twitching atop the sheets.

Unsure of what else to say, Alyssa offers, "She… seemed nice."

"…Yes. Kind woman. Doesn't deserve—" Alison blinks, shakes her head into the pillow. "—never mind. How—how are you, Allie?"

"Better than you," Alyssa replies without thinking, startled by the nickname. She has dim memories of Alison calling her that when she was four, five, before… everything. "Sorry—I mean—"

God. She doesn't know what to _say._ It's all jumbled up in her head, resentment and terrible fear and knowing that somewhere in this city Alison's been keeping a distant eye on her, showing off her artwork to friends and saying, what, _the daughter I've never spoken to in eleven years made this?_ _isn't it beautiful? isn't she talented?_ —it still doesn't make a bit of sense. And how is she supposed to answer a question like that if she doesn't even know how she feels?

"I guess I'm okay," she says.

"…I always… wished…" Alison closes her eyes, and for a moment Alyssa thinks the pain written across her face has nothing to do with her injuries. "Tommy?"

"Yes?"

She doesn't look at him; her gaze is fixed on Alyssa alone, her eyes hard with an odd determination. "Could you fetch a nurse for me, please? I… think… a little more morphine…"

Dad goes at once, pausing only to squeeze Alyssa's shoulder on the way out. As soon as he's gone, Alison says, "Allie. Come here, please. I need you to—to listen very carefully."

One of her hands lifts, grasping weakly at nothing, as if by mere effort she can compel Alyssa close enough to take her hand; nervous, Alyssa edges toward her.

"I never wanted to leave you," Alison says—barely a whisper, barely a breath. "I never, ever wanted… do you… do you remember that night? When I—?"

Alyssa drops heavily into the chair Dad just vacated, staring down at her knees. The kind of stormy night she'd loved as a little girl—rain in almost solid sheets and lightning etching jagged paths across the sky. Alison wielding a pair of garden shears against the daffodils in the backyard. Alyssa had run out to stop her from destroying the flowers, lifted her hands—

She doesn't remember the shears closing on her hands or the pain that follows, but Dad told her once that her scream was the most horrifying sound he'd ever heard. And the scars are still there, ugly lines slashing across her palms.

She offers a one-shouldered shrug. "I guess."

"Do you remember the moth?"

"…the what?"

When she looks up Alison's eyes are closed, relief slackening the lines of tension in her face. "You don't," she whispers. "Well, that's something… But you will, I think. Now that—" She shakes her head. "There's no time to explain everything. What's important is that there—there was a man, and he was using me to hurt you, and so I had to go away. And now, because you've seen me—and it isn't your fault—he's going to come after you directly."

" _What?_ "

Alison shakes her head. "There's more to this story than you can imagine," she says. "Our family's been wrapped up in it for generations, ever since—"

"Mom…" Alyssa stumbles over the unfamiliar word, reaching out to take Alison's hand; cool fingers clutch at her wrist, holding her tight and wrinkling the thin fabric of her gloves. "…are you… sure you're not still, like—"

"This is _not_ a delusion!" Alison says, with such vehemence that Alyssa jumps. "I need you to leave here as soon as your father gets back. Go to 3052 Bainbridge Avenue and ring the bell for apartment 422. Alice will be at home. Tell her I sent you to collect the things in my writing desk—in the center drawer. Take them home with you and—and just look at them, please. _Please._ Read my notes. Look at the photographs."

"I don't underst—"

"Look at me, Allie." Alyssa obeys and meets Alison's gaze—ice-blue and lucid despite the faint haze of morphine, intent, deadly serious. "I love you so _much,_ " she whispers. "And I've put you in danger again and this time I can't—I can't be the one to protect you, I'm stuck—" She blinks as tears well in her eyes. "So you have to protect yourself and to do that you'll need to know everything. Please."

"I—"

Alison squeezes her hand. "3052 Bainbridge Avenue. Promise me."

For a long, long moment, Alyssa holds her stare, watching tears begin to drip from her eyes, watching the desperate, pleading twitch of her expression—tries to pretend this sudden outpouring of nonsense isn't freaking her out. She swallows, hard.

 _What's the harm?_

"Okay," Alyssa whispers. "I promise."

She sticks around the hospital for another hour or so before announcing that she needs some air. Dad gives her a knowing, sympathetic look as she leaves.

Outside, it's muggy, way too hot for the late-April afternoon she dressed for, but at least nobody looks twice at her. New York's one redeeming feature, she thinks as she locates Bainbridge Avenue, is that her plaid miniskirt and matching pink bustier don't draw the kinds of disapproving glances she's used to getting back home.

It's a quick, though unpleasant, walk. Sunlight bakes the pavement and the smothering, humid _weight_ of the air gives her the sense of walking through a furnace. As the street numbers tick down, she thinks longingly of her skateboard, of coasting easily through this heat instead of slogging through it.

Eventually the street bends and, a block later, she arrives at 3052. Little walk-up with an ugly, sandy brown facade. Feeling awkward, she shuffles around until she finds the buzzer, hunts through the faded numbers until she finds 422. The label next to it reads _STETSON_ in neat, blocky handwriting.

Half-hoping nobody's home, Alyssa presses the button. Counts to thirty before someone answers—a woman's voice, garbled by the intercom.

"Hello?"

"Uh—hi." Alyssa clears her throat, scuffing her toe against the pavement. "This is Alyssa Gardner. I'm—I'm here to see Alice Stetson?"

She's about to go on, stutter out an explanation of why she's here, but the door into the building unlocks with a loud buzz. At once relieved and disappointed, Alyssa pushes it open and ventures into the stuffy entryway beyond. Not much inside, only a bank of scratched mailboxes on one side and a flight of stairs in peeling green paint on the other. After a moment's hesitation, she heads up.

She hears the soft patter of footsteps as she reaches the second landing. She's halfway up the next set of stairs when Alice reaches her, looking bemused but not displeased to see her. "Hey," she says.

"Hi, Alice," Alyssa says. "Thanks for—uh, Alison—Mom. Gave me the address."

"Ah." Alice's expression melts into simple curiosity, which is somehow worse. "Come on up."

"Right." Alyssa follows, her stomach twisting with nerves. "Uhh. So… I talked to… Mom today, and she said there was some stuff in her writing desk she wanted me to see? Like, uh, notes or photos or something."

To _protect herself._ Fucking ridiculous.

"Her envelope, yeah," Alice says vaguely. "I can let you in. I was gonna go in and water her plants in a bit, so…"

"I'd really appreciate it."

"It's no trouble." She smiles, too gently for Alyssa's liking. "How's she doing?"

"…Uh." It seems too callous to say that Alison mostly seems to be doing _crazy,_ with a good helping of awful on the side—but Alyssa can't think of any nicer way to put it. After a second she settles on, "Better? Um, how's your daughter?"

"Chloe? Pretty okay, you know, considering. She's a little trooper. Gets it from her dad." Alice rifles a hand through her hair, which is loose today and exploding around her head in a halo of dark-red curls. "My mother-in-law's entertaining her now, getting clobbered at chess. Chloe's fantastic at chess; she gets _that_ from her dad, too."

"What about you?"

"I'm not _terrible,_ " Alice says, and laughs. "But when I need my ego knocked down a peg I challenge Chloe to a game—let's leave it at that. And here we are—c'mon, I'll get my keys."

Alice leads her out of the stairwell and into a long hallway with scummy grey carpeting and narrow doors painted the same dull green of the stairs. Apartment 422 lies at the end of the hall, the door's deadbolt kicked out to keep the door propped open.

Inside it has the look of something cobbled together in fits and starts, not decorated so much as _occupied._ The bookshelf dominating the main room is so crammed with books it looks like it might burst. There's a pair of mismatched armchairs with a scratched card table bearing a chessboard set up between them; in one of the chairs sits a girl, maybe nine or ten, with a blanket draped over her shoulders and a pillow clutched against her torso, a _Dora the Explorer_ doll tucked at her side. She's pale, tired-looking, but smiles when they come in.

"Hi, Mom," she says. Then, glancing at Alyssa, "Who're you?"

"Chloe, this is Alyssa—Ms. Ruskin's daughter." Alice plucks a keychain off a hook by the door and steps further into the apartment to kiss the top of Chloe's head while Alyssa looks away, feeling awkward again. "Where's Edwina?"

"She lost," Chloe says, "so she went to make tea."

"Mm. Well, I'm gonna show Alyssa her mom's apartment, okay? We shouldn't be long."

"Okay." Chloe's gaze drifts back to Alyssa; her eyes are the same dark brown as Alice's, though tight and foggy with pain. "Say hi to the begonias for me."

"We'll do that," Alice says, and waves Alyssa back out outside.

"The begonias?" Alyssa says as the door swings shut.

"It's a joke. You know, like the talking flowers in _Through the Looking Glass?_ "

"Oh."

Alison's apartment lies at the other end of the hall, past the stairwell and around a corner. Number 402. Inside it's all clean cream walls and photo prints. Skylines, harbor views, aged buildings framed by park trees, starlight glittering on still water… Scattered between the photos are prints of Wonderland illustrations and pressed flowers. Potted plants war with gardening books for space on a set of white shelves, which stand opposite a couch upholstered in powder-blue. An oval rag rug occupies most of the floor.

"So," Alice says as she follows Alyssa inside, "her writing desk is in the bedroom. Uh, down the hall, last door on the right. There's an envelope in the middle drawer with your name on it."

"What's inside?"

"No idea." She smiles fleetingly. "Mind if I do the plants while you check it out?"

"That's fine," Alyssa says, although—if she's honest—she'd rather not go in alone.

This isn't what she expected. It's too… clean, too _normal._ There's a pink sweater draped over the arm of the couch, a few magazines strewn across a glass coffee table— _Shutterbug, Aperture, Sunset._ The hallway, too, is tidy. Door to the bathroom open, a 31-day pill box sitting upright behind the faucet. Tiny office with photography equipment laid neatly on a desk next to a large, sleek-looking computer monitor.

Then the bedroom, a more lived-in version of the living room. Shoes laid out by the door. A half-full hamper peaking out of the closet, a knit throw rumpled at the foot of the bed.

And the writing desk, against the wall and facing out a window onto a fire escape.

It's obviously antique, with dark wood and brass fastenings. An actual inkwell with one long, glossy black quill stuck in it perches at the corner of the writing surface. There's nine drawers in all, four little ones down each side and one narrow tray spanning the distance between them.

The center drawer is locked when she pulls on it, but a moment's examination reveals a tiny, tarnished brass key hiding behind the inkwell. It opens the drawer with a soft _click_ when Alyssa tries it.

Inside are two books, one a battered _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ paperback with _Alison's_ scribbled over the front in red marker and half the pages falling out, the other a vintage-looking _Alice's Adventures Underground_ in much better condition. And next to them, a large manila envelope sealed with packing tape. _For Alyssa_ is written across the front in sloping cursive.

She sits on the edge of the bed and plucks at the tape until it begins to lift, then carefully peels the envelope open and peeks inside. There's a battered composition notebook inside, nestled among loose bits of scrap paper. A few photographs, too, drifting toward the bottom.

 _Take them home. Read my notes…_

The hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she shoves the envelope into her backpack. Alyssa glances around, uneasy, unable to shake the sudden feeling of being watched; it lingers even as she hurries out of the bedroom and finds Alice again.

"Find it?" Alice asks as Alyssa emerges. She's in the middle of pouring a steady stream of water from a glass jar into one of the plants on the bookcase, untouched by whatever weird vibe Alyssa caught in the bedroom.

"Yeah," Alyssa says. "It's a lot of stuff, though. Haven't looked through it yet. She, uh, she said to take it home and study it—but she wasn't really… making sense."

Alice looks torn between amusement and compassion as she says, "Well, people say strange things when they're on morphine. I wouldn't think about it _too_ hard."

"You think?"

She shrugs. "Maybe some part of her just wanted to share something she loves with you, and it came out a bit wrong? Look through it when you get home, maybe give her a call once she's out of the hospital. I can give you her number."

That sounded sensible—and a lot less unsettling than Alison's babble about danger and protecting herself. Alyssa rolls her shoulders to chase away the lingering chill of the bedroom and says, "Sure. I'll do that, I think. Uh—thanks, Alice. A lot."

"Sure."

Alice offers to let her stay for lunch, but as they leave apartment 402, Alyssa is struck by another bout of anxiety, an inexplicable sense of being _studied._ She excuses herself, saying that Dad will be expecting her back soon, and hurries back out into the unnaturally hot afternoon.

It's several blocks before the feeling finally fades.

She and Dad get to La Guardia around six o'clock, two hours before their flight home is scheduled for takeoff. Once they're at the gate, Dad sets off to find them something to eat and Alyssa digs Alison's envelope out of her backpack.

For a minute, she holds it in her lap, anxiously waiting for that unsettling feeling to return—but nothing happens. Breathing a faint sigh of relief, she opens the envelope and pulls out the notebook inside.

 _WONDERLAND_ is written across the front in green pen. It's obviously old; the cover is stained and going fuzzy around the edges, the tape on the spine tattered and peeling, the pages crinkled, bubbly like the notebook had gotten wet and dried out at least once. Many of them stick together as Alyssa flips through.

It's bristling with extra pieces—blurry polaroids of chessboards, flowers, and insects paper-clipped to the pages, post-it notes here and there bearing additional notes or with sketches of odd-looking creatures. A loose packet of paper bearing nothing but a long series of dates, with entries like " _14 Aug. 1869 A.W. vanishes and is found next weekend stuck in chimney"_ and " _23 Feb. 1963 A.B. reported missing and found two days later asleep in culvert."_

And the entries themselves…

The first is dated June 5, 1989 and begins _I killed a man in April._

Alyssa stares at it for what feels like an eternity before continuing to read.

 _I killed a man in April and I'm still not sure how I did it. He broke into Mrs. B's apartment and tried to hurt me and we wrestled and he fell out the window. That's what I kept telling social services. So much I almost believe it myself._

 _But there were spiders. Hundreds and hundreds of spiders I'm sure of it. And M. The moth. "Ask for a hand or eight feet," M. said. It didn't make sense until I saw the spiders and then it DID, and I asked, and they attacked Wally. I'm sure of it. They went up his nose and in his mouth and he jumped out the window to get away with it—and M. set it all up. He said he meant it to happen._

 _"Imbalance brings balance and chaos is an equalizer," I think that's what he said. And that I was meant for more than this world, but I don't know what that means… And maybe I imagined the whole thing? Ms. S. did say trauma can play tricks on your memories… But it seemed so real. Seems._

 _I shouldn't feel bad but I really do. I just wanted him to leave me alone._

 _I'm going to sneak into the laundry today and use the mirror there to call M. If he shows up I guess that means it was all real, and if not…_

The next few pages are stuck together with water damage; Alyssa flips forward quickly until she finds the next legible entry. It's short, dated July 7, 1989, and only eight lines long.

 _1\. A thunderstorm captured in a stone._

 _2\. A thimbleful of headwaters from the Pool of Tears._

 _3\. A dying ember pulled from the heart of a flame._

 _4\. A feather that has touched the edge of the sky._

 _5\. A shard of cold-iron soaked in blood._

 _6\. A twist of Time preserved in silver._

 _7\. A jarful of Nothing._

 _8\. A needle threaded with a strand of starlight._

There's smears of ink beneath the list, as if additional items or maybe an explanation were written below, whatever it was is blurred beyond legibility.

She keeps thumbing through the pages, hoping to find something that makes the individual entries add up into sense, but it's all like that—diary entries that read like something out of a B-roll horror film or odd, fantastical notes.

And then she gets to the last two entries.

The second-to-last is dated _January 5, 1992,_ and is a mere five words in length: _"I can't do this anymore."_

The final entry was written _April 12, 1998_ —two days after the date that's been seared into Alyssa's memory for eleven years, two days after she got in the way of Alison's breakdown, two days before her family unravelled.

The old paper is blotchy with what look like teardrops.

It reads:

 _Dearest Alyssa,_

 _If this journal has fallen into your hands, it means one of two things: either I am dead, or I have failed._

 _I am writing this as I wait for a bus to take me away from Pleasance, and away from you. I know how desperately this will hurt you and believe me if I knew of any way to avoid it I would take that option in a heartbeat. Because I love you, Alyssa. I love you so much more than I would ever have believed possible before the day five years ago when I first held you in my arms. You are the light of my life and it kills me to leave you._

 _But I have no other choice._

 _When I was sixteen, I was approached by a man named Morpheus. He was magical, and he told me that I was meant for greater things than this human world could offer me, and I believed him. For three years, I worked with him—visiting in my dreams, learning magic, training to undergo a series of tests._

 _Morpheus is from Wonderland. It is very real, although somewhat changed from how it was when Charles Dodgson published his novels under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll. It is also slowly dying, because of a taint created when a young girl named Alice Liddell—the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland—fell into Wonderland by mistake._

 _She was there less than a day, but it was enough to set in motion a chain of events that will eventually lead to the destruction of a marvelous land. For a long time, Wonderlanders were able to slow the progression of the taint, but in 1988—one year before Morpheus approached me—something went terribly wrong. Since then, the situation has grown rapidly more dire._

 _Our family is a piece of this puzzle, Alyssa. When Alice Liddell returned home, she grew up and married and eventually gave birth to several children. One of those children was named Leopold, and before he died, he conceived a child with his mistress, Agatha Shaw. After Leopold's death, Agatha immigrated to the United States and gave birth to Earnest Shaw—my grandfather, and your great-great grandfather._

 _Morpheus believes that our bloodline—our ability to trace our roots back to Alice Liddell, the girl who poisoned Wonderland—means that we are the key to reversing the taint and saving the world he loves so dearly._

 _He is not evil, Alyssa, only a man trying desperately to save what he loves._

 _But he is ruthless, and determined, and willing to do_ _whatever it takes_ _to save Wonderland. Even if it means hurting people. Even if it means hurting you, my daughter._

 _In the end, I never attempted Morpheus's tests. I met your father and fell in love, and I turned away from Wonderland and never looked back. Maybe it was cowardly of me. Maybe I had a duty to do what I could to help. But that is the choice I made, and when I look at you—when I look at your father—I can't bring myself to regret it. I love you both so much._

 _And that is why I am leaving, Allie, because two days ago I learned that Morpheus has been speaking to you. Two days ago, I saw him with you—he often takes the form of a massive black moth in the human world, and I caught him playing with you in the gardens. I attacked him, and in the process I hurt you very badly. Nothing I can say will ever fix that, nor express how sorry I am for hurting you. I will never forgive myself._

 _Last night, while your father sat with you in the hospital, I came home and summoned Morpheus, just as I used to when I was young and courageous and had nothing better to live for. I demanded an explanation. He confessed that he has been using my mind as a conduit into yours. If, sometime in the future, you find yourself reading this, you most likely will not remember. You're so young. But he has been slipping nightly into your dreams, just as he once did into mine, and "playing" with you—teaching you the very things he taught me, hoping that when you grow up, your mind will be so entwined with his training that you will feel_ _compelled_ _to help him._

 _I swore then and there to leave you—to put enough distance between myself and you that the connection between us would be broken, and he would be unable to access your thoughts. And I made him swear a vow on his true name that he would_ _never_ _approach you again unless you sought him out first. (Swearing a vow on your true name is a very potent thing, for a Wonderlander—remember that if you ever find yourself among them.)_

 _My hope is that this will protect you, and allow you to live as normal a life as possible. There is always a risk—you may stumble into his path somehow, and technically have sought him out—and if you are reading this then that has likely already happened._

 _In that case, I can't tell you what to do next. That is your decision, and if ultimately you choose Wonderland—I can't stop you. But I can protect you, by sharing with you everything I know of Wonderland, of the Alice taint, and of Morpheus. I will put this notebook in a safe place along with anything else that might prove useful, and if you need it you will have it._

 _And I have two final pieces of advice for you:_

 _First, never put your full faith in Morpheus. His ultimate loyalty lies with Wonderland, not with you, and he_ _will_ _sacrifice you to save his country if he believes that is what it will take. Question what he says and keep your guard up._

 _Second, remember that NOTHING IN WONDERLAND IS WHAT IT SEEMS AT FIRST TO BE. This is a land that runs upside-down and backwards from the one you are accustomed to. Assume that everything is a riddle or a trick question and proceed accordingly._

 _I love you, Alyssa. I have always loved you and I will always love you from the very bottom of my heart. I cherish you. I am proud of you. It breaks my heart that I will not be able to tell you these things as you grow up, but they will always,_ _always_ _be true._

 _All my love,_

 _Your mom,_

 _Alison._


	4. take a risk take a chance

**FOUR.** _TAKE A RISK; TAKE A CHANCE._

It's just past midnight when they land in Amarillo and another forty minutes before Dad pulls them into the gravel drive in front of their duplex in Pleasance. Alyssa's dead-tired, beyond ready to crawl into something comfortable and pass out; Dad bids her a weary goodnight and leaves her to slump into her bedroom, suitcase in tow.

Her bedroom's filled with an eery, greenish glow courtesy of her aquarium: a massive nine hundred gallon, four-foot-deep tank long and wide enough to dominate fully a quarter of the floorspace in her bedroom, lush with real foliage—some of it growing up out of the water and drifting hairlike clusters of roots in the water, others swaying gently beneath the surface—and sunken logs that turn it into an underwater jungle of a playground for Aphrodite, her electric eel. As Alyssa drops her suitcase at the foot of the bed, the eel twists through the water, breaking the surface a few times as if to welcome Alyssa home.

Although realistically speaking, she's just hungry again.

Sighing, Alyssa fishes a feeder platy out of the twenty gallon on her desk and lets it slide through the gap in the aquarium's cover, then flops onto her bed to unlace her boots. She keeps half an eye on the eel, whose long anal fin ripples beautifully as she chases her prey from one end of the aquarium to the other and then pounces with sudden, violent grace. Poor platy never stood a chance.

She kicks her boots aside and wriggles her toes with satisfaction. After six hours in a cramped airplane seat, it feels _amazing_ to set her feet free.

Then she gets up, stretching as she turns—

 _—movements in the mirror_ —

Alyssa whips around to face the cheval mirror in the corner, her heart hammering furiously against her ribs. Nothing. There's nothing. Trick of the flickering shadows cast by Aphrodite's winding movements. Or maybe exhaustion's making her see things.

Still, it itches at her as she changes into a tank and sweatpants, and before she goes to bed she hauls a spare blanket out of her closet and tosses it over the mirror. She'd read more of Alison's journal during the flight, and there'd been a whole entry devoted to the dangers of uncovered—

Not that she believes any of it. It's just—

 _Just in case._

—just so her imagination won't get the best of her tonight.

When she sleeps, she dreams—not of monsters this time but of a man looking out of mirror, tar-black eyes so deep Alyssa might suffocate in them staring her down through the glass. He's the most fascinating, most terrifying thing she has ever seen, regal and haughty, his mouth crooked in a narrow smile and his body wreathed in shadow. She recoils from him, trips, falls, tumbles over backwards—or else can't budge an inch.

Impossible to be sure.

The man presses delicate fingers against the inside of the glass and murmurs, "Alyssa, Alyssa…" She can't be sure whether she hears or simply _knows_ the words, and his tone is a velvety purr that puts her at once more and less at ease. He tilts his head to one side, chiding. "Fear is unbecoming on you, luv. Try daring on for size."

She finds her voice, hoarse and shaky. "Who are you?"

"That answer, like so many others, lies within you," he says lazily. His eyes glimmer with amusement. "I trust you'll find it in time—along with everything else you've forgotten."

A flutter of nerves; Alyssa draws her knees up, feeling vulnerable. Exposed. "What do you mean?"

"Wonderland," the man says, "awaits you. And you are running very late, luv, and running out of time. Best take the key and take a leap; set right the wrongs of Alices past and you can reap rewards beyond your imagining." He pauses, tapping a finger against his lips. "You may wish to wear blue; it _is_ traditional."

"But—"

"Don't stop until you find me."

The shadows swirling around him sigh, enveloping him and then dissipating like mists shredded by sunlight—and then there's nothing in the glass but her own reflection.

She starts awake.

The blanket slid off the mirror sometime in the night, but—with the greyish watery light of dawn coming in through the windows and a good night's rest behind her—it seems silly to have been so afraid. Alyssa kicks out of the covers and jabs a button on her clock, to stop it from ringing when the alarm is set to go off a few minutes from now.

Fragments of the dream drift in the back of her mind, fading like dying embers as she showers and prepares for school. Her phone buzzes as she pulls a striped t-shirt over her head, and she digs it out of her backpack eagerly.

 ** _[ from:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _carpool?_

 ** _[ to:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _yes please. yours or mine?_

Jenara's been her best friend for six years, ever since the Holt family moved into the other half of the duplex; they've been taking turns driving each other to school since Jen got her license four months ago. Not every day, but after the long slog of the weekend…

 ** _[ from:_** Jen. ** _] →_** _urs? moms gonna pick up some fabric for me today & needs the car._

Alyssa fires back an affirmative and goes back to rummaging through her closet, searching for her favorite jacket—plain and black, cropped, with cute lapels and runched sleeves that end just above her elbows. Once she finds it, she lays it out on her bed to put on before she leaves.

It feels kind of weird, going back to her normal morning routine after the weekend in New York. Like somehow everything has changed and nothing has changed at the same time; Alison is still a strange and distant figure but also now _her mom lying in a hospital bed with a torn-up face and broken body,_ maybe a link in a powerful lineage stretching back to the Alice of _Alice in Wonderland_ and maybe just a sad woman living out her life in quiet delusions in a big noisy city.

 _But he has been slipping nightly into your dreams, just as he once did into mine…_

Frowning, she glances into her cheval mirror. Just her own reflection looking nervously back at her—red stripes, fluffed black skirt, harlequin tights, face presently bare of makeup and her hair hanging freshly-dried and loose around her torso. Just a regular teenager, except for the four-foot-long high-voltage fish swimming in impatient circles in the tank behind her.

She can barely remember the dream by now. Except for the eyes, black and liquid like ink-filled hollows in a pale, angular face…

With a shiver, she slips out of the bedroom to get some strips of raw liver for Aphrodite's breakfast.

Pleasance High has always been a grin-and-bear it affair. Alyssa isn't exactly _bullied,_ but she's never been popular, either—the mosaics of dead insects and oddball tastes in clothes put most people off—and the gossip bubble is fast and vicious. Teachers paid too little to give a damn. And then the little annoyances—the shrill bell, the carpets an unappealing dead-grass-brown, the weird taste of the water out of the fountains, the turbocharged air-conditioning.

It just feels _surreal_ today. Jen, a vision in pink and cotton-candy blue, fairly floats beside her as they walk from the crowded parking lot to their US Gov classroom, and the rest of the student body seems to drift around them like performers in a loosely-choreographed dance; Alyssa's thoughts keep sliding away from her, slippery, uncertain. Like part of her's still stuck in a hospital ward in the Bronx, like part of her's chasing white rabbits.

They don't get a chance to really talk until lunch break, and Alison's envelope is deadweight in Alyssa's bag all morning, seeming heavier each time she thinks of it. She must look a nervous wreck; Jen keeps glancing at her like looking at a frightened animal, soft, kind, studiously non-threatening.

She doesn't like it. Sympathy's all well and good in the abstract, but never something Alyssa's been comfortable receiving.

When the lunch bell rings she and Jen stake out a picnic table in the dry field behind the school. Sack lunches are a daily ritual for them, Jen being too vegetarian to stomach the food in the cafeteria and Alyssa preferring food whose ingredients she can be sure of.

"So," Jen says.

"So."

"You okay?"

"I guess," Alyssa says. Jen leans over and catches her wrist, her hand warm and soft despite the fingertips roughened by endless sewing, and Alyssa ducks away from the compassion in her eyes. "Uh," she says, "Alison—my mom—things got weird."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," Alyssa says, and tells her everything. Alison's outburst at the hospital. Alice. The notebook. The letter. The photographs, which she spreads out over the peeling surface of the picnic table as she talks. Among them there's a snapshot of an enormous moth, black as pitch with a sheen of iridescence down the wings; looking at it too long plucks something in the back of Alyssa's mind. A memory, maybe. A dream.

 _He has been slipping into your dreams…_

"So," Jen says when she's finished, "your mom thinks you're Alice in Wonderland's great-great—whatever—granddaughter?"

"Liddell, I guess. She was a real person."

It sounds ridiculous. Laughable. And _yet_ —

"And that makes you, like, the Chosen One who's gonna save Wonderland. Or something."

"Or something," Alyssa agrees.

Jenara blows air through her teeth, sitting back to cast an eye over the array of photographs again. "That's, uh…"

"Crazy?"

"…You said it, not me." She sits straighter and begins to shuffle the photos into a neat stack. "I have a thought, though."

"What?"

"We can be logical about this," Jen says. "Like, it's completely far-fetched and—and _out there,_ right, but if it's _real_ then there's bound to be some way to prove it—right?"

Alyssa blinks. Twice. This isn't the reaction she expected. "If Wonderland was real, wouldn't we know about it by now?"

"We _do,_ " Jen says reasonably. "It's just, you know, fiction. _Or so we think._ "

She hands over the stack of photographs, and Alyssa, frowning, slips them back into the envelope. "But if it _does_ exist, the entrance would be in—I don't know, London or wherever. I don't know about _you,_ but I can't just skip off to England to look for a—a magical kingdom—I don't even have a _passport,_ Jen."

Jen scoops up the notebook and flips to the first entry, taps the crinkled page with a fingernail. "There's this Morpheus guy," she says. "Your mom summoned him with a mirror somehow. Maybe we could do the same."

"…I don't know," Alyssa says.

 _He is not evil; only a man trying desperately to save what he loves…_

"We could do it this afternoon. Persie's taking off 'til six—she's got some big estate sale—and it's always slow as hell on Mondays." There's a gleam of excitement in Jen's eye, and in spite of herself Alyssa finds she shares it; there's mirrors aplenty in Butterfly Threads, and if it _is_ real…

Well.

Saving Wonderland _does_ sound like a major step up from Pleasance High's drudgery.

She sighs. "It could be dangerous."

"Yeah, and you could smash your head open skateboarding. Doesn't stop you running off to Underland every chance you get."

Cracking a smile, Alyssa says, "No, guess not."

"So…"

A stirring of apprehension. Unsettling fragments of a dream—black eyes trapped behind glass, a malicious smile. Green light and oily smoke. Alyssa bites her lip, hesitates, hesitates.

She has to _know._

"…Okay," she whispers. "Let's do it."

* * *

The remainder of the school day passes in a blur of furtive note-passing and texts; Alison's journal never quite explains how she summoned Morpheus, being more focused on the effects of the Alice taint and what might be done to remove it than on such mundane details as how she and her co-planner communicated. By final bell she and Jen have come up with a half-dozen different things to try, ranging from the superstitious— _say his name three times, like Bloody Mary_ —to the wildly fantastical—incense, candles, sigils, gifts, salt circles, the whole nine yards.

After school they do a Target sweep to pick up supplies, and then Alyssa drives them both to Butterfly Threads.

Though housed in a strip mall, the little curios thrift shop is like something out of another world, with a violently pink exterior clashing with the earthy tones of the neighboring establishment; the otherwise pristine sidewalk around the mall turns cracked and pitted in front of Butterfly Threads, a veritable forest of weeds pushing up through the gaps and spilling onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

Inside it has the cluttered, claustrophobic look of curios shops everywhere—racks of used clothing and paintings. Facing the entrance there's a display of mirrors, two dozen at least, some perfectly preserved and others tarnished, cracked, and faded by age; the shop's floor is taken up with dense displays of antique clocks, china, cameras, toys, figurines and jewelry. Behind the counter is a long shelf boasting four gilded, antique sewing machines and one lobster, the size of Alyssa's head, cast in bronze. A small display of Persephone's more esoteric interests, crystals and little bunches of herbs, spins lazily next to the cash register.

Persephone herself is thumbing through her planner when they come in, a tiny frown creasing the sepia-brown skin between her eyebrows. She's a compact woman, short in stature but built broad and dense as a live oak—strong and rooted deep enough to survive hurricanes.

She greets them as they enter with a little wisp of a smile. "Hello, Jen. Alyssa. How are you?"

Alyssa ducks the concerned gaze. Persephone's eyes are her softest feature—dark, doe-like, infinitely gentle—uncomfortable to look into at the best of times. Like having her soul read. "I'm okay," she says. "Glad to be back. New York was—it's—it's a lot."

"Good." Persephone steps out from behind the counter, gathering up car keys and a shapeless leather sack of a purse as she goes. "Text if you need anything—there's fresh nectarines in the back if you want—I'm off."

"Have fun," Jenara says, and Persephone flashes another quick smile on her way out the door.

In the silence she leaves behind, Alyssa glances nervously at Jen, at the mirrors along the wall, back again. Jen's knuckles have gone white around the strap of the Target bag.

"So," Alyssa says, and Jenara sucks in a deep, bracing breath.

" _So._ "

For all their preparations, now that they're actually _here_ Alyssa just feels… silly, _awkward._ It's ludicrous to imagine they'll accomplish anything, and the weird apprehension in her chest is no different from the half-frightened anticipation of sleepovers spent trying to summon terrifying urban legends in the dark. It _won't_ succeed, but _what if…_

She breathes out sharply, shrugs off her backpack and dumps it onto the counter. "Let's get this over with."

Jenara moves, looking as jumpy as Alyssa feels, and dumps out the spoils of their Target run on the floor in front of the mirrors. A pack of fat black candles. Morton's salt. Cheap incense, a glass jar, rice. Construction paper, markers. Small lighter with electric blue plastic casing.

 _He's not a demon,_ Alyssa had written an hour ago—graphite scrawled in the margins of her notebook. She and Jen sat next to each other in English Lit; that made note-passing easy. _We don't need all that stuff._

 _Yeah,_ Jen had scribbled back. _But just in case, right?_

With a quick glance out the shop's windows to affirm that Persephone's gone and no customers are about to walk in, Alyssa hurries to the back of the shop.

"Alison wouldn't have had any of this crap," she mutters, crouching beside Jenara. "She was a foster kid in a group home when she first summoned him—remember?"

"Yeah," Jenara replies absently as she pops the seal on the salt and begins to pour a large half-circle around the mirrors, "But maybe if she'd had a little protection things wouldn't have gotten so bad for her, right? I mean, if it got so awful she had to run away and hide everything…"

Alyssa bites her lip. "Point."

They carry out the rest of the preparations in silence. When they're finished, a thick line of salt arcs from one edge of the mirror display to the other, the black candles set up at even intervals along the outer edge of the line and seven sticks of incense bristling from the jar at the very center.

While Jenara lights the incense and candles, Alyssa carefully writes out Morpheus's name on one piece of paper and draws the outline of a moth on another; absent anything else, those would have to do for sigils.

It all feels frighteningly real in a way that looking for ghosts in a mirror when she was ten did not.

As a final step, Jenara gets up to dim the lights and they sit side-by-side on the outside of the circle, the "sigils" laid out in front of them and the bobbing lights of the candles reflecting eerily in the glass.

"Ready?" Jenara asks.

 _Nothing will happen._

"Yeah," Alyssa says.

"Okay. So now we… concentrate on the sigils? Or do you wanna try saying it out loud first?"

"Out loud," Alyssa says firmly. It seems less… stupid that way.

"Okay." Jenara grabs convulsively at her hand, holds, squeezes. "You should do it. You're the one with the mystical Wonderland connection."

"Right."

For a moment she hesitates, gazing into the spotted glass of the largest mirror—big enough, she can't help thinking, for a human-shaped creature to fit through with ease—its reflection distorted and uncertain thanks to the warping of its backing over the years. The frame is pewter or something like it, ornately carved into the shape of some long, sinuous, feathery creature which crawls through foliage, berries, flowers, thorns. In the candlelight her own face seems alien—angular to the point of gauntness, blue eyes swallowed up by shadows.

She grips Jenara's hand a little tighter and whispers, "Morpheus."


	5. through your own reflection

**FIVE.** _THROUGH YOUR OWN REFLECTION._

 _Morpheus,_ and the ashy bindings of an old agreement shudder and crumble to dust. To less than dust; and now an imperceptible shift in his mind, a fresh clarity, the drifting threads of a severed link pulling taut once again—

Pulling him up short with a teacup raised halfway to his lips; with quick, stuttering movements he drops the cup in its saucer and shoves his chair away from the table. It hits the packed earth with a dull thud, and draws the eye of everyone else in attendance.

"Distinguished guests," Morpheus says, his tone level—and there is nothing much distinguished about this motley crew of disaffected avians and battered cards, but honesty never pays—"dear friends, a new development has just come to my attention and opportunity demands that I seize it. By all means, continue the party in my absence. I will return with good news, I hope."

 _Alyssa!_

His footsteps quicken until he is running, and then the change rushes over him; the world spins and his body breaks apart and _whirls_ and the wings come out and catch a warm draft and he's airborne just like that, riding the breeze as it bears him aloft. Toward the uppermost reaches of his sanctuary, towards hope, towards _her_ —

He beats his wings once, twice, and drops out of the air, nearly stumbling with haste as he shakes himself out of the moth form again. A single stride carries him the rest of the way across his study; he lifts trembling hands to peel back the velvet cloth over the mirror.

There's no reflection to gaze back at him as the cover slides away, only the reverse image of his study: the old bookshelves, the moth-nibbled davenport and gilded hookah perched beside it, the ornate silver clock ticking in reverse, the trickle of sunlight and flowering vines through gaps in the walls.

The image dissolves into mist as Morpheus plunges into it.

Inside the mirror, a storm of glittering, hazy reflection of _elsewhere_ —shapeless, formless, shifting like the shadows of a candle flame—

— _home—_

He kicks off the back of the mirror frame and _soars,_ swift as lightning, more graceful as he rides the currents of light and shadow than he could ever be outside of a mirror, searching, searching— _there!_ —

She is older, now. Eleven years have transformed the chubby child of his memory into a gawkier teen not quite grown into herself yet—though there are hints, he thinks, of the woman she will become. Her wild golden curls are tamed into a loose braid, her jaw set with determination beyond her years as she peers into the mirror, and her eyes—blue, blue, bluer than the sky—hold that _spark_ of Wonderland he sought so urgently to cultivate.

A sharp shock races down his spine as she looks, and _sees_ —

" _Morpheus,_ " she breathes.

He touches the inside of the glass, reverent in a way. The girl is a pawn, naught but a means to an end, and yet Morpheus still feels some genuine _fondness_ for her. When he slipped into her childhood dreams, he found her imagination vivid and her curiosity irrepressible; she followed him boldly through the trials he constructed in her mind, listened to his tales with greedy longing.

It's a shame she will almost certainly die, if she walks the path he's laid out for her.

" _Dear_ Alyssa," he murmurs, allowing the melancholy he feels to touch his voice. He flicks his gaze to the array of candles and incense spread on the floor between them, the wavering line of salt presumably intended to trap him in the mirror. Superstitious nonsense. He is no fae nor any sort of demon, to be frightened away by salt and candlelight. "Is this how we greet old friends?"

Her cheeks burn scarlet. "I thought—" she begins, and stops, coughing awkwardly. "You were in my dreams last night."

"You dreamed of me?" It's an unexpected pleasure—such a rare thing these days—and Morpheus smiles as he crouches, bringing their eyes on level. "No, luv, I've no bridge into your mind, anymore. Your mother burned it years ago. Your dreams are your own until— _unless_ —we build another."

He lets that suggestion linger with a sly grin and a hint of promise; Alyssa ducks, biting her lip, her blush growing more pronounced.

"I've read everything in Alison's journal," she says after a moment, looking up at him again. "And I still have so many questions. How did Alice Liddell mess everything up so badly? How was mom—how am _I_ —supposed to fix it? What is all that… _stuff_ for? The thunder in the stone and all that? Where do you even _get_ something like that? And—and who _are_ you, really?"

"Who are _you?_ " Morpheus counters.

She glares at him. "You know who I am."

"Do I?" He bounces his eyebrows. "I know your name, Alyssa Gardner, as you know mine—but 'what's your name' is a _very_ different question from 'who are you.' So, dear Alyssa, _who are you?_ "

"…I asked first."

"Aye, that you did," he says with a quick, approving nod. "I'm naught but a man trying to pull his home back from the brink of destruction. The rest of Wonderland sits complacent, or else too frightened of the queen and her right hand to do what must be done. I, however, am a man of action. And you?"

Morpheus studies her while she hesitates. There's suspicion in the narrowing of her eyes, a wariness and caution for which Alison is doubtless to blame. Not for the first time, he curses the fractiousness nature of their parting, the shattering of the trust Alison felt for him. Had he known she'd one day bear a daughter even better suited to the task than she, Morpheus would have handled her departure very differently.

No use crying over spilled tea, he supposes. At least Alyssa is willing to hear him out.

After a while, Alyssa says, "I'm just… me. I'd like to help, but I don't know how I'm supposed to, or… or what I can do that somebody else couldn't do better." She looks down, shamed by her own admission.

Sympathy tugs at his heart. "You aren't _just_ anything, Alyssa," he says. "You are very, very special. In a world of—what is it now, six billion? seven?— _billions_ of people, Wonderland reached out and chose _you._ "

Or Morpheus chose her, at any rate. Very nearly the same thing.

"Did it?" Alyssa asks faintly.

"Oh, yes," he says. "You, and you alone, can save Wonderland. I once thought your mother the perfect candidate for the role, but after she abandoned—" Morpheus breaks off, lets that world congeal unpleasantly in the space between them for a second or two. Ill-concealed pain flickers in Alyssa's eyes, an emotion he mimics. "— _Well._ In any case, the situation in Wonderland has worsened considerably since Alison's… departure, but now—just as I began to despair that we had at last run out of time—here _you_ are."

"Run out of time for _what,_ exactly? What were you and Alison trying t—"

"Wonderland is _dying,_ Alyssa. You can save it, if you act swiftly." He leans against the glass again, his nose almost touching the cool, flat surface. If he could only reach through it and _touch_ her—grasp her hand, make her _see!_ "Come to Wonderland," he whispers. "Find me there and together we'll set right what Alice put wrong."

Urgency and rapture color his voice; to rip the pretender from the throne, to return to the wild and uninhibited days before the Abovegrounder child set catastrophe in motion—!

"How?" Alyssa asks.

Morpheus shakes his head, frowning. "Not here. Not now. There are things I daren't explain from the inside of—"

"No," Alyssa says. "How do I get to Wonderland?"

 _Yes!_

"I'll send the rabbit for you," Morpheus says, breathless with triumph. "Follow him and he'll show you the way."

"When?"

"Soon. You'll know him when you see him."

The girl beside Alyssa giggles, a trifle hysterically. Morpheus glances at her for the first time, taking note of the details for later reference. Her hair, the violent pink of a tulgey tree in full bloom, froths over her forehead in tight, springy curls; her dress appears home-made, an artful patchwork of colorful fabric and lace. The overall effect is of a particularly energetic garden.

She would, Morpheus thinks disdainfully, not look out of place among the _Hatter's_ crowd.

"Have you something to add?" he asks, with frosty politeness.

"You okay, Jen?" Alyssa says.

The girl—Jen—shakes her head vigorously. "No—I—I mean, I'm fine. But this is—" Another shake, and then she looks squarely at Morpheus. Her eyes, in contrast to Alyssa's light ones, are a deep, earthy brown. "You can't seriously expect us to just _believe_ all this."

"I believe him," Alyssa mutters.

Jen shoots her a rather exasperated look. "All he's _done_ is say you're the only own who can do it and to, to run away to this _other world_ with no explanation of what you'll be doing there. That's not enough."

"But—" Alyssa begins, although fresh doubt tugs at her expression.

"Your friend is right," Morpheus says smoothly, before this can get any further out of hand. "Of course, you will want assurances from me. That is only natural. Only tell me what I need do to win your trust, and I will do it—if it is in my power."

Jen opens her mouth to say something, no doubt to demand that he explain himself properly, but Alyssa cuts over her. "Alison—my mom—why did she…?"

"Leave?" Morpheus guesses, and she nods. "The… task ahead is not without potential risk," he says slowly. "There are many who would stand in our way, those who benefit from the present status quo enough to blind them to the perils ahead. Among them, the Queen of Hearts and her sycophants."

"The Queen of Hearts as in, like…" Alyssa draws a hand across her throat, makes a cartoonish gagging noise.

"Indeed. Alison and I made immense progress—laid the all the necessary groundwork for the final step of our plan—and then, in the eleventh hour, we were discovered." His lips purse as he considers the question of how much to reveal. "To the Queen, our plot was naught but another in an endless string of attempts to usurp her power. She called for our heads, and the hunt began."

Alyssa exchanges a glance with her friend, wide-eyed.

"What happened?"

"We fled. It is the only thing to do, when one has attracted the wrath of the Queen. Understand, Alyssa, that your mother is no coward—on the contrary, she has always impressed me with her bravery—but even the most courageous soul can falter.

"We headed south, aiming to pass through the Looking Glass and seek sanctuary among the chess people. A pack of the Queen's executioners anticipated our movements, and caught us on the open plains as we approached. Alison fought with greater ferocity than I had ever seen, and between the two of us we slew a number of our assailants… but we were outnumbered. Badly."

"How did you escape?"

Morpheus grimaces. "We did not. Not that day, at any rate. Alison caught a fatal blow, and I—recognizing that she would swiftly bleed out while the battle raged on—surrendered at once. The executioners patched her up and we were both dragged to the royal palace in chains.

"It would have been the guillotine for both of us had the March Hare not owed me a favor." He cannot suppress the flash of irritation he always feels at the thought of the March Hare; in those days, Morpheus had still counted Morris as one of his greatest allies.

Were it not for the thrice-cursed _Hatter_ —

"—As it was, she twisted the White Rabbit's arm and arranged for the both of us to escape. Alison returned Aboveground, where she would be safe to wait out the Queen's wrath. I went into hiding for several months. The Queen is possessed of a wonderfully short attention span; soon enough a fresh crisis claimed her attention and the writs of execution for myself and your mother were forgotten.

"Too late, alas. I hastened to collect your mother, intending that we would pick up where we left off, and found her determined never to set foot in Wonderland again. Her close brush with death had set her mind against it—against me." He pauses to gaze mournfully at Alyssa. "We fought. I am afraid I said some things that I… regret, and it only deepened her conviction. She wanted no part in me, anymore. Out of respect for her, for the friendship we once shared, I kept my distance."

"Until she had me," Alyssa says.

"Until she had you."

She sits quietly for a long moment, pondering this. Morpheus watches the play of emotion across her face, the hesitation, the doubt, the curiosity; he wonders if she can sense the parts of the story he left unfinished, sketched out in only the broadest strokes, or if she suspects him of simply lying outright.

Eventually she says, "I… lost my mom, because of you."

He bows his head, closing his eyes for a long moment. "Indeed. She caught us together, and—reacted as any mother would. My quest nearly resulted in her own death, once. The thought that it might destroy you, too, terrified her."

Morpheus does not apologize. He will not apologize for his own desperation.

"Why did you do it?" Alyssa whispers. "Why couldn't you have waited until I was _older?_ "

"Impatience," Morpheus says. "Wonderland's time runs thin. And… I rather hoped to protect you, in a way. The task, as I have told you, is not without risk. I reasoned that approaching you earlier would mean more opportunities to train you, teach you the things you needed to know to survive in Wonderland… and when you were old enough, you could enter my world prepared to face the danger and _overcome_ it."

Alyssa mulls _this_ over for a moment, too, then turns to Jen, eyebrows raised in wordless question. Jen taps her chin, thinking, and says, "Well… it squares with what Alison said about him, I guess."

"What is this _task_ you and Alison were trying to complete?" Alyssa asks.

Shaking his head, Morpheus says, "That, I cannot tell you here. The Queen has ears everywhere, even in mirrors. It is best to leave talk of the future unsaid if there is even the faintest chance she will hear it."

"I… understand," Alyssa says slowly, glancing at Jen again. The other girl shrugs. "Well… I believe you. I… don't think I trust you, but… I'll watch for the White Rabbit."

"That's all I can ask, for now," Morpheus says. He rises out of his crouch, smoothing the front of his waistcoat and offering the pair of them a shallow bow. "I give you my word that I will explain everything in full once we meet in Wonderland. Until then, Alyssa… Fennine light your steps. Be well."

"Um—Godspeed," Alyssa says awkwardly, and Morpheus grins at her before letting himself fall backwards into the whirlwind of reflections.


	6. bearing crumpets and tea

**SIX.** _BEARING CRUMPETS AND TEA._

Hatter steps neatly out of the mirror. She twists the key in the wooden frame, locking the glass behind her, and then lets her footsteps carry her to the window. There is nothing much to look at, only the fitful churning of the sea far, far below.

It doesn't matter. Her thoughts are a world away from the frothing waves.

 _What are you up to, little moth?_

Hiding in the smallest of the available mirrors had granted Hatter a less-than-ideal view of the child her troublesome rival sought to lure to Wonderland, but there could be no mistaking those blonde curls and mournful blue eyes.

She drums her fingers against the stone windowsill. That girl had drawn Alice to herself like a magnet; afterimages of the encounter still swim in the back of Hatter's mind, and the anxiety it inspired still twines snakelike through her gut.

Wonderland sings bright and clear in the girl's blood—it _must,_ for nothing short of Wonderland could have distracted Alice so efficiently from the tiresome fretting over her daughter's safety. And now—

Hatter is not a believer in coincidence.

She whirls to face the mirror, her gaze so intent on the little key protruding from the frame that her own reflection, consigned to her peripherals, is abstracted down to harmless smears of white and red.

This is, she tells herself as she unlocks the glass again, a foolish thing to do. Dangerous. She learned nothing in her eavesdropping that could not safely be conveyed in a letter. If the Queen hears of it—

 _Don't care,_ she thinks, and plunges through her reflection.

Inside the mirror, a journey of miles fits into the space of a few minutes, a hurried free-fall, and a dizzying vortex of glimpsed reflections. She emerges from the mirror hanging from the decaying back wall of the Looking Glass House, and without breaking stride continues straight into the peculiar darkness of the Looking Glass.

An instant, an eternity of disorientation—the uncomfortable sensation of being spun around and turned inside-out—and the Looking Glass spits her out into Wonderland. The bored-looking Two of Spades manning the border starts in surprise.

"Your Grace—"

Hatter claps them on the shoulder. "I was never here, you understand?"

The Spade stares at her miserably. Hatter can see the wheels turning in their head, spinning toward the inevitable conclusion that playing her game would be a great deal better for their health than the alternative.

"Expect it's just the heat making me see things," the Spade mutters at last.

"It _is_ unseasonably warm today, isn't it?" Hatter says, beaming. Without waiting for a reply, she sweeps past them and ducks into the mirror affixed to their post. Hatter knows this leg of the route well enough to travel it in her sleep, and the speed of her journey scours the last of her doubts away. When her palms hit the cool glass of her destination's mirror, there's nothing in her head but a kind of icy clarity.

She raps thrice on the glass, and waits a minute or two for the curtain on the opposite side to be drawn back. Morris quirks an eyebrow to see her there, and surprise makes her clumsy as she fishes the key from her trouser pocket.

The glass shivers and turns insubstantial as Morris jams the key into its frame, and Hatter tumbles out and into her waiting arms.

"Hatter! —Not that I'm displeased to see you, but what's the occasion?"

"Reconnaissance," Hatter says, and manages a grin. Morris is warm and solid and has a way of bleeding the tension out of her, of muffling the muttering darkness in her head. "Put a kettle on, darling, and I'll tell you all about it."

Intrigue glints in Morris's deep-set hazel eyes. She takes Hatter by the hand and pulls her out of the mirror room, down the hall to the kitchen in all its garish yellow glory; Hatter hops onto the fastidiously tidy counter and crosses one leg over the other while Morris bustles from one end to the other to fill the kettle.

"Morpheus," she says, once the stove is lit, "is up to something. Moreso than usual, that is. He took a mirror Up There and spoke to—" _to the child she saw through Alice's eyes_ "—to some Abovegrounder child. He spun her a tale of tragedy and her mother's heroism and pleaded with her to come to Wonderland, to… ah, set right what Alice put wrong, I believe is how he put it. He mentioned you."

"Oh?"

"Or it may have been Haigha he meant, I don't know. Seems the March Hare helped him duck Her Majesty's axe once upon a time." She glances askance at Morris.

" _Ah,_ " Morris says. "Yes, yes, that was a few years before your time! _Nasty_ business—well, no nastier than anything else Natalya wet her claws in, I suppose." She pauses, though her hands never slow as she pinches tea leaves into a strainer. "The Queen caught him plotting with an Abovegrounder to—er, rumor was he wanted to put the _Abovegrounder_ on the throne, can you _imagine?_ Natalya and her little gang caught them quick enough and dragged 'em to Argine, and I found out not too long afterwards because Natalya spent all of tea boasting about how she'd gutted the Abovegrounder girl, and, well. Morpheus had gotten me out of a tight spot a few months prior, so it seemed only right to save his neck! Plus, letting an Abovegrounder go to the block… Got the Family involved straight away and we smuggled the girl back home, and Morpheus went— _wherever._ Maybe to Rilchiam, I don't know—aren't he and the Caterpillar cousins?"

Hatter shrugs, and Morris purses her lips as she flips the strainer closed.

"Well, _wherever._ Didn't hear from him again 'til after the Jabberwock crisis!"

"Hmmm."

Morris procures a teapot from the cabinet next to the stove, content to leave Hatter to her thoughts for a time. Her account reveals little that Morpheus's telling did not, and Hatter resolves to request the official records from Argine the moment she returns to her citadel.

At length she says, "From what I gather, he wants to give it another try with the next generation. Whatever _it_ is. He was awfully vague on the subject."

"Paranoid, isn't he?" Morris says, without a trace of irony.

Dryly, Hatter says, "Not unfounded, is it? But I haven't gotten to the important part yet, darling. This girl he spoke to, I—"

Her voice hitches, and Morris glances at her sharply.

"What is it?"

"Alice _knows_ this girl," Hatter whispers. "I saw her not three days ago—don't give me that _look,_ Morris." An expression of mingled fear and indignation had flashed across Morris's plump features. "It began again in the last week or so, and it's only been the _briefest_ of flashes. I fully intended to mention it in my next letter."

The accusatory slant of Morris's mouth does not quite disappear, but she lets it pass.

"So," Morris says, "Alice is involved."

"He wants this girl—Alyssa, her name is Alyssa—he persuaded her to come to Wonderland. He's going to send the _Rabbit_ for her, Morris! If he can force the Rabbit Hole open for her—"

An icy spike of terror pierces her voice, but there's no need to finish the sentence. Morris understands the workings of the Rabbit Hole better than hatter does.

"Ah."

The kettle shrills, and Morris turns jerkily to deal with it. Hatter stares wildly at the rickety icebox across the way and tries to quell her rising panic.

It's going on twenty-one years since the Rabbit Hole jammed shut. Twenty-one years without Alice, and Hatter had dared hope that maybe, _maybe,_ it would stay that way forever.

 _Maybe_ —

That fragile hope dies in an instant if the Rabbit Hole becomes un-stuck. If Morpheus, in his haste to finish whatever game he's playing, heals the wound that has been Hatter's salvation these last twenty years.

"Tea," Morris says, and shoves a cup under her nose. It's tangy, with a spicy note that tickles as she inhales the steam. Hatter blinks.

Her fingers quiver as she accepts the offering, lowers the cup to cradle it in her lap. "If…"

 _Don't make me say it._

"We'll survive," Morris says, with a confidence Hatter envies. " _If_ she does come. She might not! Wonderland's done fine without her!"

"She will," Hatter mutters. Certainty prickles over her skin, claws at the back of her skull—Wonderland may have no need for Alices anymore, but _her_ Alice needs Wonderland now more than ever. Only the broken Rabbit Hole keeps her out.

Morris presses her hands to Hatter's knees and then, when this fails to elicit much reaction, slides them up until she can grasp Hatter by the wrists. "I'll have a word with Cole," she says. "He'll listen to family over insects, eh? And if Morpheus wants the kid so badly he can smuggle her in through the Looking Glass instead." She squeezes, so gently Hatter might have imagined it. "We'll be alright. _You'll_ be alright."

Privately, Hatter doubts the White Rabbit has the spine to stand up to Morpheus even if Morris _does_ bully him into trying, but she appreciates the sentiment. With a weak smile, she slides free of Morris's loose grip to raise the teacup to her lips. A powerful blend of orange and cinnamon blooms over her tongue as she drinks, a fortifying warmth against the sickly chill in her stomach.

"It's good," she murmurs, tapping the rim of the cup and trusting Morris to catch her real meaning. And then, "Perhaps I'll pay the Queen a visit before I return."

"Is that wise?"

Not at all, but Hatter hadn't gotten this far through an excess of caution. She sips again at her tea, and says, " _Someone_ ought to warn her there's a plot afoot to usurp her. Again. News such as that is too sensitive for putting in letters and, surely, important enough to disregard the prohibition against unauthorized crossings."

Let her be Morpheus's problem for a while. Thinking of the moth being run to ground by the Queen's dogs lifts her spirits considerably.


	7. just look out below

**SEVEN.** _JUST LOOK OUT BELOW._

Other than an unusual skittishness that settles under her skin and makes her jump at movements in her peripheral vision, nothing comes of Morpheus's promise to send the (White, presumably) Rabbit to take her to Wonderland _soon_ —if Jen hadn't been with her, Alyssa would wonder if she hadn't just imagined the whole thing. Four days pass in a flurry of nervous anticipation and schoolwork she can't get her brain to focus on, and she spends the first part of the weekend at Underland, discovering ways to fidget on a skateboard she never would've thought possible just a few days ago.

Hitch notices the second she shows up for his Saturday afternoon skateboarding class. He cocks an eyebrow at her but says nothing until the hourlong lesson ends; afterwards, he ambles over to wear she's wrestling with her new kneepads and sinks into a crouch beside her.

"Something on your mind, kid?"

Alyssa shrugs and doesn't meet his eye. He only calls her _kid_ when he's really serious about something. "I'm okay."

To her embarrassment, he plops down on the concrete next to her instead of leaving her to pretend she's fine in peace. Hesitant, he says, "Rumor is you missed last week's class because of some family thing that came up. I'm not gonna pry, Gardner, don't you worry, but—hey. You ever wanna talk, I'm a good listener and a better secret-keeper. Sometimes it helps to just speak about stuff, yeah?"

"You sound like my guidance counsellor," Alyssa mutters. Hitch snorts.

"Pleasance High, right? Old Mr. Makelke still the counsellor there?" Off her nod, he says, "Yeah. Got real familiar with the inside of his office when I was in school. Practically lived there senior year. He's a good guy."

She doesn't know quite how to respond to that. Hitch had been a senior at Pleasance High when Alyssa was just a freshman, and he'd already had a bad enough reputation that she'd been scared silly of him. He'd been even ganglier, then, with horrible acne, a habit of brawling in the hallways during passing periods, and a long shadow of rumored criminality that followed him wherever he went. Alyssa's pretty sure not a bit of it was true, but even so, it's hard to imagine him sitting in the counsellor's office—among the delicate potted plants and the stupid motivational posters and all the college catalogues and glossy brochures—spilling his problems to a man as mousy and soft-spoken as Mr. Makelke.

"My mom's—sick," Alyssa says after a moment. "Dad and I went to see her in the hospital last weekend."

"Must've been rough."

"She'll get better, but… yeah, I guess so." Focusing on Morpheus and Wonderland had driven Alison's condition to the back of her mind, but it comes rumbling to the forefront again now. By her request, Dad hasn't been sharing the daily updates he gets from the hospital with her; she knows there were more surgeries this week and not much else. "She left when I was five," she adds. " _Left,_ completely, I mean, she never even wrote or called…"

Her voice peters out, and Hitch lets silence fall between them, not uncomfortably. Alyssa shoves her kneepads into her backpack and looks out over the bowl without really seeing it.

"My parents kicked me out," Hitch says. He's not looking at her when she turns, shocked; his gaze, like hers a moment ago, is straight ahead and fixed on nothing in particular. "Right after I turned seventeen. August before senior year. Found out some stuff about me they didn't—found out about Cory." He coughs. "It's, uh, it's rough, when parents don't… _parent,_ you know? That's really, it cuts real deep. 'Cause parents are, you know, they're supposed to be _there._ "

Alyssa flips her hands over to study her palms. The scars are there, _always_ there, clearly visible through the loose netting of her gloves. "These are from her," she says. It feels terrifying to say it out loud. She's never told anyone before, writing the scars off as relics of a childhood car crash—she's not really sure why she's telling _Hitch,_ of all people, but the words pour out easy enough. "The scars. It was an accident, she had garden shears, she didn't see me in time—just an accident—but, anyway, that's why she left. I guess she was too scared she'd do it again to stay. But—but… I wish…"

Alison had suggested in her letter that physical distance was the key, getting far enough away that Morpheus couldn't get into Alyssa's head through hers. But she could have called, or written letters, or sent holiday cards or _something_ —there'd been no reason to cut Alyssa out of her life so _thoroughly._

"Yeah. …Yeah," Hitch mutters, and that, Alyssa thinks, just about sums it up.

She sighs. "I've gotta get to work."

"Well, don't let me keep you." Hitch jumps to his feet, quick and agile, and offers her a hand. Alyssa clasps it, and he hauls her upright without even a grunt of effort. "Same time next week, yeah? You take care of yourself in the meantime, Gardner."

Alyssa grins as she slings her bag over her shoulder. She feels lighter, somehow. "You too. And… thanks."

"Anytime." He sets one foot on his board and waves as he pushes off, popping an ollie at the edge of the bowl and then swooping down along the curves of concrete with a casual grace she envies.

She turns to go and crashes right into Jeb. His arms are folded, pulling the white T-shirt he wears under his manager's vest taught across his chest, and he makes no effort to catch her when she reels back, dazed more by the suddenness of his appearance than the actual impact.

That alone is enough to tell her he's ticked; the stormy glower he's directing at the bowl is just the proverbial cherry on top. Alyssa stifles a groan. Not like she can't guess what _this_ is about. "Hitch is bad news, blah blah blah, don't date evil players, blah blah. There. I get it. Lecture over. Can I go? I'm gonna be late for work."

His jaw clenches. " _Do_ you get it? 'Cause it looked to me like you were getting nice and cosy with Mr. _Bad News._ "

"He wanted to know why I missed his class last week, that's all. It's called being _nice_." Frowning, Alyssa steps around Jeb and marches for the exit.

Jeb flashes out a hand, grabbing her elbow and spinning her around. "There's no 'nice' with guys like him," he says. "I know his type, Al. They'll slime their way in by being _nice_ and then as soon as you give 'em a chance—"

Alyssa twists out of his grip and resumes her stomp towards the exit. To her annoyance, Jeb follows, easily keeping pace with his longer legs. "I'm serious," he says. "You deserve better than some prison sentence waiting to happen, okay?"

"I deserve better than being late for work," Alyssa retorts.

"I'll drive you. I already clocked out."

" _Seriously?_ "

This time, it's she who stops; Jeb pivots around her and gets the full force of her incredulous glare.

"Yeah," he says, unapologetic. "You've been avoiding me since you got back—longer, actually—and, look, I get that you're mad about the London thing, and worried about your mom, but you can't go acting out and getting tangled up with guys like Hitch." He pauses. "I'm not gonna let you do stupid things and get hurt just 'cause you're angry at me, okay?"

For a second she thinks about saying something childish, _you're not the boss of me_ or a mocking _okay, DAD—_ but her heart isn't in it. Things were rocky between her and Jeb even before he interfered with her study abroad plans, have been rough, really, ever since he started dating Taelor a month ago and riled up a jealous streak Alyssa hadn't known she possessed. She's tired of it. Tired of feeling like their friendship's slipping away, like she's losing him piece by piece to Pleasance High's own Head Bitch In Charge and her own anger and the looming shadow of his departure to University of Arts London. And she's got bigger problems to deal with than nursing a grudge against one of her two best friends. She relents with a grudging huff.

"Fine. Drive me to Butterfly Threads, but spare me the rest of your lecture. I could probably recite it in my sleep anyways."

Jeb's lips twitch. "Deal."

The rest of her anger melts away as they head for the parking lot together. What's left is a kind of weary optimism; she and Jeb still need to have it out over him stabbing her in the back on the London plan, but after that, she thinks, they'll be okay again. Even if his bossy-big-brother crap _is_ obnoxious.

It's grey and hot outside, the heat a wet, heavy thing that promises thunderstorms later. Alyssa glances across the lot, searching for Jeb's beloved Honda CT70 and unsurprised to see it's nowhere to be found. "Jen drop you off today?" she asks.

"Yeah. Supposed to rain." Jeb holds out his hand for her keys, grinning when she slaps them into his palm. "Guess I'll just walk home from the mall."

"You could hang with me," Alyssa says. "Persephone won't mind as long as you don't mess with the displays."

He hums noncommittally, but Alyssa can tell he's considering as they make their way across the lot to where she parked Gizmo, her 1975 Gremlin; she tosses her bag under the passenger side dash and sinks into the seat with a sigh. The car rocks gently when Jeb drops into the driver's seat a few seconds later.

"I've got a date with Taelor tonight," he says. "Gotta get home by four to get ready."

Alyssa feels her stomach drop. It's almost three, and her shift doesn't end until seven. "Oh."

Jeb shoots her an apologetic grin. "Maybe some other time."

She doesn't answer, instead staring out the window as Gizmo's engine grumbles to life and Jeb peels them out of the lot. She never knows what to say when it comes to Jeb's relationship with Taelor. On the one hand, she and Taelor have been friends since kindergarten, even if Taelor's ascension to popularity back in middle school put a strain on their friendship that's been driving them apart inch by inch. Jeb could do a lot worse. On the other—

Alyssa grimaces. Them getting together stirred up the echoes of a middle school crush she'd thought long since dead and buried, and the way she'd reacted when she found out feels like it might've been the last nail in the coffin of her and Taelor's friendship. The whole thing still feels… _uncomfortable_ a month later.

Clearing his throat, Jeb says, "So, uh, there's this speed painting thing at Wilcox Plaza tomorrow afternoon."

Grateful for the change in subject, Alyssa turns to look at him again. "Are you one of the painters?"

"Mmm. We get a canvas and ten minutes, and all the pieces get auctioned off at the end. Pleasance Council of Arts takes a share of the proceeds, but I could still make a decent bit of cash if mine sells well." His labret spike bounces as he chews his lip, like he's worried no one will bid on his artwork. Fat chance of that—Jeb's one of the best artists Alyssa knows. "Mom and Jen'll be there. You could come too, if you wanted. Could be fun. And there's gonna be barbecue after, so…"

It _does_ sound fun, and a welcome reprieve from the stress of the past week. "Sure. Maybe I'll bring Dad, too. You know he can't say no to free barbecue."

Relief breaks over Jeb's face. "Great! Painting starts at eleven."

"We'll be there," Alyssa says, grinning, and just like that—just for a minute—it's like there's no problems between them at all, and it hits her just how much she's _missed_ him, missed him at least as much as he's missed her.

The spell breaks as Jeb guides Gizmo into the narrow alley behind Butterfly Threads, edging carefully around Persephone's dusty Prius to park next to the dumpsters. She'd like nothing more than for him to come in with her, keep her company between customers and help her dust the shelves or re-arrange the racks of used clothing to stay busy during the usual five o'clock slowdown. If it weren't for Taelor…

She sighs and accepts the car keys he hands her. "Thanks for the lift."

Jeb nods. "Sure, Al. It's nice talking to you again."

"Yeah."

"Yeah…"

He rubs his chin, his finger swiping over the labret spike, looking like there's a lot more he'd like to say. Alyssa's tempted to ask him to stay, at least a little while—Taelor won't die if her boyfriend takes a bit less time to prep for their date, right?

But she hesitates too long, and Jeb just coughs awkwardly and says, "Well. Guess I'll see you tomorrow, huh?"

"Eleven o'clock," Alyssa says, managing a smile.

"Right."

His eyes crinkle up as he grins, and then he steps away and turns and slopes off down the alley—the loose waves of his hair ruffling as the wind catches him on the way out—and in a few seconds he's gone.

Alyssa turns slowly and heads into the shop.

* * *

It starts raining about forty minutes into her shift. Alyssa pays it little mind as the light drizzle escalates to a miserable downpour, coming down so heavy she can't see more than a few feet out the front windows. Every so often a mall patron dashes by, arms over their heads or brandishing their umbrellas like shields against the driving rain.

A little past five, the lights flicker and die, plunging the shop into a chilly gloom.

She's rearranging the crystal display when it happens, and pauses for a count of thirty to see if the lights come back on. Quick blips and momentary outages aren't unheard of during thunderstorms, but this one seems set to last longer than the usual.

Persephone's voice drifts out of the backroom, low and indistinct; a few minutes later she leans into the shop proper and says, "Someone hit a pole on Route 60. Power's out 'til it's fixed."

"Is that a 'lucky you, you get to head home early'?"

Though Alyssa can't see it in the darkness, she hears the smile in Persephone's voice. "Drive safe, Alyssa."

The roads aren't bad, but the rain outpaces Gizmo's wipers just enough to make her nervous. She drives home with brights on and both hands on the wheel, squinting to see through the water streaming down her windshield.

Dad's spot in the garage is empty when Alyssa gets home—probably still closing up his sporting goods store. She shoots him a text to let him know she's home safe as she fumbles around for one of the flashlights they keep in the utility room.

She's always liked blackouts. The mingled peace and spookiness of wandering through your own home in the dark—with nothing but a flashlight and the occasional flash of lightning to guide you, while thunder booms and rolls outside—speaks to the same sensibilities that drive her to incorporate dead insects into her artwork.

A kind of poetic creepiness.

Humming, Alyssa leaves her bag on the kitchen table and makes her way upstairs to check on her fish. Both Aphrodite's tank and the twenty gallon where she keeps her feeder fish are wired into a backup generator programmed to start if the power goes out, but she spends a few minutes checking to make sure all the tank equipment is still online just in case. Satisfied that her fish aren't going to freeze or choke to death before the power comes back on, she scoops a jacket out of her closet and heads back downstairs, intending to duck out to the covered back porch and enjoy the storm. Maybe keep an eye out for Morpheus's rabbit.

Just as she hits the bottom step, there's a squeal of tires and then a heart-stopping crunch from outside; Alyssa runs for the door, thinking of Dad coming home from his store and old tires on slippery gravel, heart galloping in her chest as she hurts out of the duplex—

Not Dad. It's Taelor stumbling out of her car, whose front bumper is crumpled around the telephone pole at the end of the drive. She's dead pale, heedless of the rain soaking her lacy T-shirt. Shaken but, Alyssa is relieved to see as she splashes toward the wreck, unhurt.

"What happened?!"

"There—there was—" Taelor grasps for Alyssa's arm, gripping tight enough to hurt. She's shaking hard. "Some—some _idiot_ jumped in front of—I swerved—and th-the car…" Her hand rakes through her hair, pulling thick strands out of her sudden ponytail and leaving her looking even more bedraggled. Her voice fails her, but Alyssa can see her lips forming the words _oh my god_ over and over.

"Tae…"

Taelor bursts into tears. Wracking sobs bend her in half until her forehead's resting on Alyssa's shoulder, her lithe frame heaving with hysteria as she cries. Alyssa wraps an arm around her, at a loss. "Listen," she says awkwardly, "lis—you didn't hit anybody, you're fine—"

"I am _not_ fine, Alyssa! The power—and Dad—and we're going to miss—everything was supposed to be perfect and now it's _ruined!_ Not that it means anything to you—you're probably so _pleased._ " She spits the final word through her tears and wrenches away, reaches up to pat at the sopping ruins of her hair. Alyssa takes half a step back, shocked by the outburst.

 _Well, fine. Be a bitch about it, then._ "Your date. Ruined. Right. Stupid me, thinking the important thing is no one got hurt."

"That's not…" Taelor sniffs. "You don't get it."

"Sure don't." Alyssa folds her arms, glaring. "Look, just— _ugh_. Whatever. _God,_ you're shallow sometimes."

Standing here with the rain soaking her shirt and plastering her hair to her cheeks, trying to comfort a girl she's _barely_ friends with anymore, is not how she wants to spend her unexpected evening off. She turns on her heel and heads back toward the duplex. " _Whatever._ Jeb's probably inside—go cry on _him._ "

"Alyssa!"

" _What?_ "

She rounds on Taelor, who's given up on her hair and now stands limply in Alyssa's driveway like some pathetic, waterlogged puppy.

"Sorry. I just…"

But whatever she's about to say is lost under a low, ominous _grinding_ noise; the ground quivers, and there's a _crack_ somewhere under Alyssa's feet—

A piece of driveway the size of her torso shudders and falls away into deep black nothing. As Taelor screams and the duplex door slams, more pieces follow, cratering in under the weight of the rain and her and Taelor's scrambling to reach the lip of the sinkhole—mud and gravel and Jeb shouting and Taelor's fingers locking around her wrist and Alyssa thinks _oh god we're both dead—_

And then she's running on nothing but air, plummeting into darkness.

Down and down and down.

…And down…

 _…Are sinkholes always this deep? Shouldn't we have…?_

It dawns on her that they're no longer falling through a dark, empty cavern but some sort of shaft—flat stone walls flank them on four sides. Through the murky darkness, Alyssa can just make out the flowing lines of graffiti tags, and here and there clusters of weather-beaten posters, all scrolling by at a relatively sedate pace.

 _No way._

She twists around as they fall, or sink, trying to see the bottom. There's a greenish glow six or seven feet down, but as they get deeper that proves to be nothing but the words _YOU ARE HERE_ spelled out in flickering neon.

Taelor whispers, "What the hell."

They sink past the sign, until it's nothing but an indistinct glow far above their heads.

"I hit my head," Taelor says faintly. "I must've—"

"No," Alyssa says. "No, this is—if we're _both_ seeing it, it's got to be real. Right?" She squints again into the blackness below, trying to gauge the distance to the bottom. Nothing. "Looks like the rabbit found _me…_ "

" _AL!_ "

Jeb.

She can't see him when she looks up, can't see anything but shadows and the fading light of the sign, but her imagination fills him in—teetering on the edge of the sinkhole, screaming her name, panic rising up—

"We're okay!" she shouts.

" _We are NOT OKAY!_ "

There's no indication that Jeb hears either of them; his cries become fainter and fainter and then vanish altogether. Taelor shouts his name a couple times and strains to reach the walls, muttering about climbing out again, but they always seem to be just out of reach.

They might have been falling for minutes or hours or days, even, when at last a concrete floor rushes up to meet them. The impact is no worse than a hard landing on a skateboard—rattling Alyssa's bones and leaving her wobbling but still upright; Taelor collapses in a heap beside her and groans.

"You okay?"

More groaning. "What fresh hell have you dragged me into _now,_ Alyssa?" Taelor pushes herself upright, her well-toned arms shaking—from fear, Alyssa imagines—and wipes damp hair out of her face. "I mean, bad enough that your nutjob neighbors can't stay out of the _fucking_ road, now—"

"Wonderland," Alyssa says, too awed by the reality of it to care about the venom in Taelor's voice. "We're in—this isn't what I imagined."

It's very… plain. They're in a spacious room with concrete floors and barren sheetrock walls. Electric lights hum at regular intervals across the ceiling, filling the room with an unpleasant, sallow glare; there's nothing else here, no doors or tables or little boxes of magical cake or _anything._ They might as well be standing in an abandoned warehouse.

Still, it's Wonderland. It must be.

"That's _right!_ "

Alyssa almost jumps out of her skin as the voice bounces around in the vast emptiness of the room. She spins in a full circle, searching for the source, and then Taelor screams and scrambles to her feet, pointing—

 _There,_ standing a little ways away from them and shaking gravel and dust out of his messy white quiff, standing in what seconds ago was an empty stretch of concrete, is a man. He's a little taller than Alyssa and decidedly pear-shaped, dressed in white slacks and a white grid coat; the only spot of color on him anywhere is a little red heart pinned to his lapels.

"And _he'd_ better appreciate it, too!" the man continues bitterly. "The Hatter's going to be absolutely _savage_ with me once she learns you're here! _Stupid!_ I shouldn't have done this! She'll have my ears for it, sure as sure—!"

" _You!_ " Taelor snarls, startling him out of his raving. He cringes away as she stalks towards him. " _You_ were the idiot in the middle of the road!"

He pales. "You! You-y-y-you nearly _hit_ me!"

"You totaled my car!"

"Better the car than me!" He jogs backwards to keep a safe distance between himself and Taelor, who looks mad enough to kill. "And don't blame _me._ How was I supposed to know people would be _driving_ in those conditions?"

Alyssa hurries to get between them before the situation can escalate any further. "Taelor! Taelor, calm down. Your dad'll just buy you a new car anyway."

Taelor growls, but makes no effort to escape Alyssa's grip on her shoulders. In another moment, the flash of anger is gone; she goes pale again and hangs her head, shivering. Probably still shaken by the crash, Alyssa thinks with a pang of sympathy.

She turns back to the man, who's patting at his chest with his nose in the air, looking very offended.

"Sorry," she says, figuring Taelor's in no state to apologize for herself. "Who are you?"

"Who do I _look_ like?" he says, scandalized, then mutters, " _Kids_ today…"

"…Um."

Still muttering to himself, he draws a silver pocket watch out of his waistcoat, glances at it, and turns a sickly shade of green. "Oh my ears and whiskers, is it that time already!? Sorry, kids, have to run!"

"Wait—!"

The man spins on his heel and dashes away—on the fourth or fifth stride his body seems to fall and _twist,_ and there's a blur of movement Alyssa can't make sense of—and then she blinks, and he's gone altogether; in his place there's a small, white rabbit, zig-zagging across the concrete as it races away.

 _Oh._

" _WAIT!_ "

Ignoring Taelor's splutters, Alyssa seizes the other girl by the wrist and charges full tilt after the rabbit.


	8. a special place, with a lot of space

**EIGHT.** _A SPECIAL PLACE, WITH A LOT OF SPACE._

"So. Lemme get this straight." Taelor's voice oozes sarcasm, and Alyssa holds back a long-suffering sigh. "Wonderland is real, Alice Liddell somehow _cursed_ the place back in Victorian times, you and your mom are _descended_ from her, somehow, and before you were born Mommy Dearest tried to undo the curse, or whatever, but chickened out at the last minute, and now _you're_ here to do what she couldn't—and also hook up with some hot dude you saw in a mirror—?"

" _Taelor!_ "

"What?"

"I am not _hooking up_ with _anybody,_ " Alyssa says, while her face burns. Taelor gazes back at her, all blithe innocence.

"I wouldn't judge," she says. "What better way to get over _my_ boyfriend than screwing your manic pixie dream guy, right?"

She says it so casually that for a second, Alyssa can't make sense of her actual words—and then it hits her like a bus, and abrupt, prickly silence descends between them. Anxiety churns in her stomach, ties her intestines in knots.

"I—! I'm not _hung up_ on Jeb! —or! or _anyone!_ " she splutters at last.

Taelor hums. "Whatever. So you're going to set Wonderland to rights, just as soon as you figure a way out of this place—is that it? How _noble._ "

They glare at each other. Alyssa says, "You could—I don't know—like, _help._ If you're so keen on escaping."

"You're the one with the childhood 'training' and mystical connection to the place. I'm sure you'll figure it out." Taelor's lips curl into a nasty sneer. "Eventually."

Grinding her teeth together, Alyssa swivels away from Taelor and casts another helpless gaze over the doors.

There's two dozen of them. Big sectional doors made of corrugated metal and set into the circular walls at irregular intervals; handles at the bottom of every door would allow for manual lifting, were they not padlocked to a metal grate set around the circumference of the room. Rust and grime creep over the doors like moss over boulders.

It's like being trapped in a dilapidated public storage facility

They'd chased the White Rabbit down the length of the room at the bottom of the rabbit hole and, just when Alyssa had thought there was nowhere left for him to run, he'd veered left—led them down a dim, narrow hall. It had grown darker and darker until they were running blind.

And then they'd burst out _here,_ with the White Rabbit nowhere to be seen. Worse, the hallway through which they'd entered had vanished, too. Half an hour of frantic searching had turned up no other exits—no unlocked doors, no seams in the bare walls, no drafty spots to hint at concealed passageways.

After the first ten minutes, Taelor had given up and flopped down in the center of the room, folded her arms over her knees, and started up a stream of snide commentary until Alyssa had launched into the whole Wonderland story just to shut her up.

"Look," Alyssa says, dragging a hand down her face. "I'm _sorry_ I pulled you down here with me, okay? Didn't mean for it to happen, and like… I _get_ that you're upset, but _this_ —" she waves an arm in Taelor's general direction "—this _attitude_ —is not helping either of us."

For a moment, Taelor says nothing, and Alyssa braces herself for another sneer. Then: "Let's assume you're right and I'm not just hallucinating while I bleed out at the bottom of a sinkhole—if we're _really_ in Wonderland, the way out will just appear as soon as you stop looking for it. Or get distracted for a second. Or something. That's how this place _works._ God. Don't you read?"

Scowling, Alyssa says, "I seem to remember a talking doorknob."

"Disney made that up."

" _Great._ That's fantastic."

So much for her foggy memories of watching the film being any help. Not that Alyssa had pinned much hope on that idea, but at least the half-remembered cartoon had been more to go on than the lessons supposedly buried in her long-forgotten toddler memories.

There'd been something about the rabbit hole in Alison's notes—underlined twice in red ink; Alyssa remembered _that_ much—but the actual words escape her, and the notebook is still in her backpack.

Sitting on the kitchen table a world away. Useless to her now.

Grumbling, irritated with herself as much as with Taelor, Alyssa aims a kick at the nearest door and shuffles over to sit next to Taelor. She stares at her scuffed sneakers as she begins to wrestle her damp curls into a braid; she'll think better with her hair out of her face.

"Don't see any materializing exits," Alyssa says after a few minutes.

Taelor lets out a loud huff, pushing a tangle of hair away from her forehead. "I was hoping for a 'Drink Me' bottle or something. If we could shrink enough to fit under a door…"

"Doesn't look like that's happening, either."

"I can see that for myself, _thanks._ "

Alyssa glares across the room, wracking her brain for anything that might be helpful. If she'd just had the foresight to grab her backpack before running outside…

For a while there's quiet, just the sound of her breathing and Taelor's and the useless thoughts spinning themselves out in her head.

"If we ever get home," Taelor murmurs at length, "I'm breaking up with Jeb. So. You know. If you want…"

Startled, Alyssa looks around. Taelor's sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, her face turned away so Alyssa can't see her expression. "What?"

"I…" A slight tremor runs through Taelor's shoulders. She coughs quietly, falsely. "He called _your_ name. Not mine. When we fell, we both… but he only cared about _you._ And, you know, he's kind of obsessed with you? He draws you all the time. Says you're his 'muse.'"

"He _does?_ "

Taelor snorts, somewhat bitterly. "Thought I had a chance with him anyway, once we started making plans to move to London together, but—"

"Wait. _What?_ "

"…What what?"

"Since when is he going to London _with you?_ "

Her posture loosening, Taelor turns just enough to meet Alyssa's shocked stare. "I got offered a modeling contract in London, so I'm spending senior year at a prep school over there. And this week I finally talked Dad into paying Jeb's living expenses as long as he was enrolled at UAL—we were gonna go out tonight to celebrate. Didn't he tell you?"

"He— _no?_ "

Air vacates her lungs faster than she can refill them; she feels like she's suddenly underwater, like the whole world is distorting and heavy and cold around her. _That's_ why Jeb didn't want her coming to London—it was never about _protecting_ her, never about—

Alyssa ducks, burying her face in the crook of her elbow. Stinging heat rushes into her eyes, and she squeezes her eyes shut to hold the tears in.

"…Alyssa?"

"I—I was gonna apply for study abroad," Alyssa mumbles. "Do a semester in London and pick up some credits from UAL on the side… Jeb convinced my dad to nix the idea. Supposedly on the grounds it would be _too dangerous._ "

Her fingers curl into fists, fingernails biting into her scarred palms.

"Well," Taelor splutters, "screw _that._ Screw him—apply anyway!"

She's so outraged that Alyssa has to chuckle, despite the acid bile of betrayal bubbling in her throat. "But my dad…"

"Screw your dad, too!" Taelor thumps her between the shoulder blades, hard enough to rattle her teeth. "Wave an acceptance letter under his nose and see if he can say no _then._ God. I thought you and Jeb weren't speaking 'cause he told you about us going to London, not— _god._ What a _dick._ "

A noncommittal grunt is about all Alyssa can work up in response, and relative silence falls again. Taelor grumbles angrily to herself as she digs her phone out of her bra; her fingernails click against the screen and, after a moment, Alyssa hears the loud _swoosh_ of an outgoing text.

"You get service all the way down here?"

"Apparently!" Taelor jams the phone back down her shirt and gets to her feet. "Now let's get out of this dump so I can dump him to his face."

She reaches down to help Alyssa up and glares around at the doors as if they, too, have mortally offended her. They seem less imposing to Alyssa's eye, now, overshadowed by the true depths of Jeb's betrayal and the odd comfort of Taelor's rage on her behalf. Alyssa takes a deep breath, rubs a hand over her eyes, and tries to _think._

All that comes to mind are the words of Alison's letter, burned into her memory more deeply than any of the notes she's skimmed through in the last few days. _Nothing in Wonderland is what it seems at first to be… Assume that everything is a riddle or a trick question…_

 _Assume…_

She stands a little straighter. "What if we pick a lock?"

Taelor snorts. "I don't know about _you,_ but I'm fresh out of lockpicks, so—"

"No, no, I mean— _pick,_ pick, like—!" Energized by the idea, Alyssa chooses a door at random and marches toward it without waiting for Taelor to catch up. "Come on!"

"What are you _doing?_ "

"Picking!"

Alyssa takes a deep breath as she reaches the door, fingers fluttering against her shorts. Pulse racing with nervous excitement, she crouches to examine the padlock; it's the size of her fist and covered in tacky, greyish grime. With as much confidence as she can muster, Alyssa wraps her fingers around the base and tugs, hard.

There's a _click,_ and the lock springs open.

"… _Seriously?!_ "

Ignoring Taelor's outburst, Alyssa grins and slides the padlock free, then grips the door's handle with both hands and heaves. The door judders, its rollers squealing on rusted tracks. As it rises to clatter into place above their heads, a swell of hot, damp air sighs out of the dim space beyond and fills Alyssa's nose with an unpleasant musty odor.

Alyssa exchanges a glance with Taelor, and in wordless agreement, they step through the new opening together.

It's another circular room, much smaller than the last and quite a bit darker. A rotting wooden card table sits in the center, upon which stands a bottle and a lump of something which proves, on closer inspection, to be an oddly-shaped lump of sandstone. It's about half the length of Alyssa's forearm, hollow through the center, with one end branching out into a series of thinner, irregular tubes—like the branches of a tree.

The bottle is glass and filled with a murky brown liquid. A crinkled paper tag looped around the neck reads _DRINK ME RESPONSIBLY_ in faded green ink.

"Over here!"

Alyssa sets the bottle down and turns to find Taelor fumbling with her smartphone. As Alyssa approaches, Taelor switches the camera light on and directs the beam toward the ceiling. There, a mere six inches above their heads, is a tiny wooden hatch—hardly big enough for a mouse—and a sturdy metal ring.

"Okay," Alyssa says. "Okay, so… We drink from the bottle, get small, and climb through the hatch? That's easy enough."

"How are we supposed to get up there when we're two inches tall, genius?"

"We could drag the table over…"

"That'll get us _maybe_ halfway.

Alyssa slides a finger through the ring and tugs. "This feels pretty sturdy. We could probably climb the rest of the way?"

"With _what?_ " Taelor snickers. "Your hair's about long enough. We could chop it off and braid it into a rope. Rapunzel-style. Pity there aren't any brambles around to break our falls if we, um, fall."

"Keep your claws out of my hair," Alyssa mutters, though without much rancor. "C'mon, help me move the table."

"That thing's _disgusting._ I'm not touching it."

"Sorry, princess."

" _Ha ha._ "

The table is a lot heavier than it looks and coated in something cold and slimy Alyssa doesn't want to think too hard about. They position it under the hatch, and then Taelor says, "Shoelaces."

"What?"

Taelor's already crouching down to unlace her muddy tennis shoes. "We can tie the laces together and use 'em as a rope. Unless you care more about your boots than your hair…"

"Ha ha," Alyssa mutters, but she kneels to undo her laces, too.

In a matter of minutes, they're standing in their socks with a length of shoelaces plenty long enough to reach from the ceiling to the table. Alyssa, reasoning that it'll be easier to get the hatch open if they have more than a shoelace to cling to, wraps one end of the laces around the hollow stone, tying it off where the branches meet the trunk and then affixing that to the ring in the ceiling to create a little hanging platform. The rest of their makeshift rope falls to coil on the splintering tabletop.

Taelor uncorks the bottle, sniffs suspiciously, and passes it to Alyssa. "You first. Better you than me if it's poison."

" _Thanks._ "

Alyssa perches on the edge of the table, grimacing as the slime coating it seeps into her shorts. The bottle's contents smell better than she expects: distinctly like fresh buttered toast, with sweet, citrusy notes that linger in her nostrils.

She takes a swig and gags. The liquid is warm and tastes like _everything,_ all at once, a chaotic tidal wave of different flavors—toast, lemonade, fried chicken, salt—sticky sweet and spicy and so bitter her tongue curls in on itself as Taelor snatches the bottle back.

Her spine collapses on itself like a telescope; the room blurs, and Taelor swells in size to fill Alyssa's entire range of vision. Damp air roars past Alyssa's ears as she falls backwards— _shrinks_ —

It's over as swiftly as it began. Alyssa lands with a _thump_ on the pitted surface of the card table, now so small that the soggy splinters protruding from the wood are almost as tall as she is. Taelor looms overhead when she looks up, big as the skyscrapers of New York City.

Alyssa scrambles out of her way, toward the shoelaces stretching up and _up_ from the tabletop. She can just make out the rough shape of the stone high above; at this height, the climb seems impossibly far.

Shivering, she turns back to watch Taelor shrink. It's an uneven process, starting in her stomach and rippling outwards, so for an instant she looks like a tiny bobblehead toy with a comically oversized head, feet, and hands; then those shrink, too, and she lands on the table with no more grace than Alyssa had.

"That… wasn't as awful as I expected," Taelor mutters as she picks herself up. The bottle shrank with her; it's now no larger than their heads, with just a few drops of liquid sloshing around in the bottom.

"Could've been worse, yeah."

Taelor sets the bottle down at their feet and squints up into the murky darkness overhead. "So…"

"So now we climb," Alyssa says. "You first?"

"Sure. You'd better catch me if I fall."

While Taelor begins to climb, Alyssa scoops up the bottle and rips the paper tag away, then uses the twine that held it in place to secure the bottle to her hip. No telling when they might need to shrink again…

Then, squaring her shoulders, she follows Taelor up the rope.

It's not too bad, once she gets into the swing of it. The fibers of the shoelaces are woven just loose enough to make it easy to find footholds and places to grip. Soon enough the card table fades into the shadows below, and a thick, seemingly infinite gloom envelopes them; Alyssa keeps her gaze fixed on the laces in just above her, now and then glancing up to make sure Taelor's still doing okay.

She loses all sense of time. Only the steady burn building in her arms and legs and lungs marks their progress.

They might've been climbing for days when they reach the stone. As small as they are, the stone is the size of a mighty tree, and its gritty outer surface makes for even easier climbing than the shoelace. Scrambling over the top of it and resting, at last, in the cradle of its branches is one of the sweetest reliefs Alyssa has ever known.

"Okay," Alyssa says, once she has her breath back. Okay, um… You grab the ring to hold us steady, and I'll get that hatch open."

"Right," Taelor says. "If it's locked I'm gonna scream."

Alyssa waits for her to get a good grip on the ring before shimmying up the tangled branches of stone. The thickest clump of them stretches up toward the hatch, and by perching at their highest point she can reach the handle without trouble.

"Please tell me it's unlocked."

"Think so," Alyssa says, running her hand over the wood. It's damp and oddly warm. "Looks like it might be jammed, though. It's all swollen up—water damage, I think?"

"Can you get it open?"

The hatch budges the tiniest bit when she yanks on the handle. "Yeah. Gimme a minute."

She settles into a more secure position on the stone, then redoubles her grip on the hatch and tugs harder. Once—twice—three times. She can feel the hatch loosening with each pull. "Almost—"

The rusted hinges give way with a tortured shriek, and—

— _PAIN_ —

—searing her palm ripping up her arm splashing her chest, jaw—Alyssa screams, falling back, arm burning with agony as she reflexively throws it up to shield her face. Her vision flashes white as her shoulder hits the stone below and something wrenches at her arms— _Taelor,_ it's Taelor, shouting at her through the fiery pain.

"Alyssa!"

She screams again. The first explosion is receding, leaving behind gnawing, acidic pain that has her clutching at her left arm, her vision swimming.

"Alyssa—fuck, _shit_ —fuck! Look at me!"

It's hot, getting hotter, heat radiating out of her arm and flooding the air, making her sweat, and Taelor's voice fades, lost amid the oppressive heat.

And she falls…

The first thing she feels is skin stretched too tight over sharpened bones, threatening to tear itself open if she moves. Then: Bright light and terrible heat, and the air dense and wet and warm against her face. She tastes salt when she licks her lips.

Whimpering, Alyssa cracks open one eye and squints down. Her palm is cradled against her chest, the skin cherry-red and swollen. Scalded. The redness crawls down her wrist and past her elbow, and from the glowing embers of pain scattered across her chest and neck, Alyssa guesses she's burned there too.

She sits up, grunting as the movements sends a cascade of shocks through her injured side.

" _Alyssa!_ Thank god, I thought—"

Fingers dig into her good shoulder, holding her steady as their stone platform wobbles. "I'm… 'm okay," Alyssa whispers, though she feels anything but. "Wh…?"

Sunlight blazes down on them through billowing pillars of steam. Open space where there should have been ceiling—crumbling masonry in the distance and, above, a violently blue sky. Their stone is secured to a lonely peninsula of intact plaster. Alyssa stares around, bewildered.

"Look down," Taelor says.

There isn't a lot of _down_ to look at. Water bubbles and churns maybe a foot below the bottom edge of their stone. Steam ghosts over Alyssa's cheeks as she peers into the frothing waves.

"How…?"

"You ripped that hatch out of the roof and flooded the place, that's how," Taelor says. "Now. Unless you wanna boil to death when the rest of the ceiling collapses, we've got to _move._ "

Alyssa winces, tucking her injured arm against her stomach. "Not sure I can climb out like this."

"I pulled our rope up," Taelor says, pointing. Alyssa follows the line of her finger to where the branches of their stone meet the ragged lip of the ceiling; the shoelaces are coiled messily in the branches. "We can wrap you up in it, then I'll climb up and pull you after me."

"Okay."

Taelor grins; there's a glimmer of hysteria in her eyes. "Don't pass out on me again, Gardner."

Without waiting for an answer, she stands—the stone rocking with her movement—and drags the trailing end of the shoelaces over to them. Alyssa lifts her arms obediently as Taelor wraps the shoelace around her torso and then loops it under her legs to form a makeshift seat. She ties it off and leaves Alyssa clutching at the fibers with her good hand.

It's not the sturdiest harness in the world, but what other choice do they have?

"Don't drop me," Alyssa says, and Taelor lets out a frightened little giggle before scrambling up and over the ceiling's edge.

After a moment, the shoelace goes taut behind her, and she calls down, "Ready?"

"Ready."

It's a laborious, jerky process. Alyssa's head swims with every yank on the harness, the uneven motions made worse by the prickling agony of shoelace fibers rubbing her blistered skin. Halfway up, she loses her battle against the roiling pain and retches, twisting her head to avoid splattering herself with boil. Her vision darkens ominously.

Then it's over, and Taelor's rolling her over the edge and out of the harness. Her cheek meets warm tiles, and Alyssa wheezes, sucks in unsatisfying lungfuls of hot, sticky air.

"Come on," Taelor says, tugging on her good arm. "C'mon, we've gotta keep moving."

Bubbles of blackness swell and pop in Alyssa's eyes as Taelor hauls her to her feet and half-drags her away from the edge. Awareness of their surroundings builds up in fits and starts, trickling in whenever the pain ebbs enough for her senses to clear. They're in a crumbling stone tower; sunlight pours in through the top; every so often they're forced to detour around sizzling puddles of water. And something—something— _something_ familiar about it all—

"Wait."

Alyssa struggles out of Taelor's grip, dropping to one knee next to one of the puddles. A memory streaks behind her closed eyelids, shimmering like a mirage in the heat: Water and stone and sunlight. Morpheus's thin, pale face and dark dark eyes, leaning in to impart a secret—

"Alyssa," Taelor says, sounding irritated, "we don't have time for this."

"The Pool of Tears," Alyssa mutters. "This is—" She rubs her good hand against her forehead, her fingers smearing through sweat and flyaway hairs. "This is where Alice Liddell came through, when she came to Wonderland."

"Okay, so…?"

"We need some of this water. It's—it's her _tears,_ it's part of the taint she left behind…"

She fumbles with the bottle at her side, tipping it over to shake out the last few drops of the drink that made them grow small and dipping it into the puddle to scoop up a generous helping of water instead.

"What are you talking about?"

"'A thimbleful of headwaters from the Pool of Tears,'" Alyssa says, hissing as the hot water bites at her fingertips. "One of the… ingredients we need to fix Wonderland." She casts about for something to stopper the bottle with, wishing she'd thought to grab the cork before she shrank.

Nothing.

 _Oh, well._ As long as they're careful with it…

Grunting, Alyssa struggles to her feet again, grateful for the arm Taelor extends to help her. "Just… trust me," she says.

"If you say so. Can we go back to trying not to die now?"

"Fine with me."

And so they walk. The relentless sun beats down and the humid air seems to grow thicker with each step; sweat plasters Alyssa's hair to her forehead and her shirt to her back, and the back of her neck starts to itch with the beginnings of sunburn. Her head starts to pound, loud enough to drown out even the pulsing fire in her arm.

At last, they reach the old stone walls of the tower, though the shade they offer provide little relief from the heat. A crack in one of the stones affords them an exit, although the outside isn't, in Alyssa's estimation, much of an improvement.

A barren rock slopes away from the tower. Dry channels cut through the exposed bedrock, which is stained white with crusted salt where it isn't scorched black. Alyssa follows the meandering lines of the channels with her gaze; they lead to a distant, glittering grey smear.

"The Bay of Sorrow," she whispers, pointing wearily. "We need to find away across. I think."

Taelor grunts. "We need water. And to cool off."

Neither of them move. Taking even one more step feels like a herculean task, one Alyssa's far too exhausted to even contemplate. Her shoulders sag.

"Well, you're not going to get anywhere being _that_ size."

There's a lizard perched on the rock beside them. Alyssa stares at it, half-convinced it spoke and half-convinced she's only imagining things; it gazes back at her with one bulbous eye, the tip of its long, whiplike tail twitching.

"I _said,_ " the lizard says, in an irritated sort of tone, "you're not going to—"

"Yes, yes," Alyssa says, wetting her lips. "We heard you the first time."

"Then you should've said so," the lizard replies snippily.

"I'm sorry?"

The lizard lashes its tail across the rock, and for an instant Alyssa thinks it might just scuttle off in a huff. Instead it says, "So. You're _her,_ then? Alice at last? Funny. I thought you'd be taller."

"My name is Alyssa—"

"You're running _very_ late." The lizard cocks its head, rising up on its forelegs so as to peer imperiously down at her. "Not surprising, I suppose, if you're too mixed up to remember your own name, eh? If you're looking for the White Rabbit, he went _that_ way." It jabs its tail to the left.

"Uh, thank you," Alyssa says, as Taelor leans around her and adds, "Could you tell us how to get big again?"

The lizard fixes her with a stony stare. "Grow bigger," it says.

"Well, yes, but—"

But the lizard thrashes its tail again and darts away, its patience spent. Taelor snorts. "Thanks for nothing, I guess." She shields her eyes from the glare of the sun and squints in the direction the lizard indicated. "It looks like there's trees that way, which means water. And shade."

Alyssa nods. There's no way they're getting across the bay like this, and right now the thought of lying down in the shade is irresistibly tempting. "Let's go."

The copse of trees Taelor spotted lie maybe twenty feet on, lush green in stark contrast to the barren scar surrounding the tower; at their present size, it may as well have been miles away. The ground grows painfully hot underfoot as they trudge away from the meager protection of the tower's shadow; the sun, if anything, beats down with greater violence than before. Alyssa wonders fuzzily if they'll make it even halfway before the heat does them in.

She never finds out; they've progressed perhaps an eighth of the way when a familiar white shape emerges from between the trees and comes barreling toward them. The rabbit slides to a halt in front of them and then, in a complicated twist of flesh and fur, unravels and is knit back together into the shape of a man. Alyssa scrambles backwards, clutching at Taelor to steady herself; they're not even tall enough to see the tops of his shiny white shoes, and her imagination paints inconveniently vivid images of the pair of them smeared over the ground like a couple of beetles.

He crouches in front of them, his face blotting out the sun as Alyssa gazes nervously up at him. She's distantly aware of his arms moving, although there's just _too much_ of him for her to keep track of; it's a shock to look down and find his hand palm-up on the ground in front of them, two tiny cakes balanced on the tip of one finger.

"What are the odds the White Rabbit tries to poison us?" Taelor asks. Alyssa isn't sure whether she's joking or not; she shrugs and approaches cautiously to pick up the cakes.

"Morpheus made it sound like I—we—could trust him," she says, holding one out for Taelor. "So, uh—down the hatch?"

Taelor rolls her eyes. Alyssa shuffles away to nibble at her cake; it's rather dry and crumbly with a distinctly carroty taste.

Her spine goes first, shooting upwards so fast she imagines she can feel individual vertebrae stretching apart; then her limbs lengthen and the ground falls away. A sickening wave of vertigo washes over her. Her shoulder knocks against Taelor's as both of them stagger from the sudden change in altitude.

" _Cripes,_ " the White Rabbit mutters, mopping at his forehead with a checkered handkerchief. "Of all the doors to pick—! Well, well, all's well ends well, right?" His beady brown eyes flick down to Alyssa's arm; he shudders. "Mostly."

Alyssa grimaces, cradling her arm closer to her stomach. "We need to find Morpheus," she says. "Can you help…?"

"Yes, yes," he says, and wipes his face again. "Hearts help me. Follow me." He turns and marches back toward the trees, saying over his shoulder, "I can put you on a ferry across the bay, but that's _it!_ You'll get no more help from me! Just keep heading east until you hit Lake Quaeritate, then follow the shore north, cross the Claret, and head on up the Or… After that you can just follow the mushrooms. And whatever you do, _don't enter the Frangible Forest!_ The Hatter will have your heads if you set foot in her territory! And mine! And if we're especially unlucky she'll get Her Majesty involved!"

"…Um," Taelor says. "That mean anything to you, Alyssa?"

"East, then north, avoid the trees," Alyssa says. "Got it."

The White Rabbit snorts. "Good! Now let's _hurry it up!_ We're already later than we have any right to be!"


	9. no time to decompress

**NINE.** _NO TIME TO DECOMPRESS._

He crept into your cheval mirror at night and whispered to you tales of days gone by. This, you remember: Wonderland wild and unrestrained and _free_ like the dreams of a child.

Like _your_ dreams.

Once upon a time Wonderland had the Queen it deserved; as ferocious and wild as the land itself, wrathful and loving in equal measure. Dangerous. Beautiful. The very embodiment of ungovernable passions and _oh,_ how the longing in his voice when he spoke of it made you ache.

 _She may have been human,_ he told you while you lingered at the border between sleep and waking, _she may have been flesh and blood like the rest of us but her soul, Alyssa—her soul was Wonderland._

Little Alice was not much older than you when she slipped into Wonderland, an impertinent slip of a thing just past her seventh year. Her wanderings would not have mattered, would not have been more than a footnote in history, had they not carried her to Argine, where the Queen held court.

None who were there that day could agree on what happened. Some said the Queen and Alice argued until the ground opened and swallowed them both; others that the Queen looked upon Alice and faded away as morning mist beneath the sun; others still that Alice grew larger and larger until she was large enough to crush the Queen to dust beneath her shoes as she climbed out of Wonderland.

In any case, the Queen vanished when Alice did.

And then: the wars of succession, the slow rot creeping in around the edges, the spreading inward of the paralyzing mists that wreathe Wonderland's borders. Waters tainted black and poisonous, and rich soil crumbling away into barren bedrock. Swaths of land scorched when the sun refused to set and the fertile plains in the north turned to frozen wastelands when the sun refused to rise.

And whispers, whispers, whispers of something worse still on the horizon, something dark and cold and cruel…

You remember a thin, pale, impish man with fingers spread wide against the glass and eyes blacker than night; you remember the shadows swirled and deepened until nothing existed but you and him and the darkness.

 _Help us,_ he murmured. Pleading. Terror and anguish in his eyes.

 _Help us, help us, help us._

The barge jolts, rolling Alyssa out of her doze. She blinks groggily, drowsiness fading even as the dream—or awakened memory?—lingers crystal-clear in her mind. It's cooler now than it was when she drifted asleep, the sun sunk closer to the horizon. Three o'clock, maybe four.

Not that time means much in Wonderland.

She feels… better.

Between the heat and her burns, Alyssa had been almost too sick to stand by the time they reached the harbor. Taelor and the White Rabbit had hauled her into a dingy room, where she'd mouthed at a glass of tepid water while a spindly-looking stranger lathered her arm with a gel that made the pain soften into a dull shadow of itself. After that, she remembers fragments: voices raised in argument, Taelor squeezing her uninjured hand until her knuckles ached. Stumbling, half-conscious, through cluttered streets. Wood bleached white by sun and salt. The taste of the sea on her lips. Sinking into the pile of wool batting on which she lays now and sliding gratefully into sleep.

Taelor was with her then, but she's gone now. Out enjoying the view from the deck, she supposes, instead of staying here in the cramped maze of cargo while Alyssa slept.

So there's silence, and stillness but for the gentle rise and fall of the barge. Sea birds don't fly over the Bay of Sorrow, Alyssa recalls vaguely; the water is too hot and too salty to support life, so gulls and their ilk look elsewhere for their meals.

Morpheus taught her that. Taught her other things, to; scraps of otherworldly poetry and politics flutter through her head like birds startled into the air by the thunderclap of her dream. Sometimes the mirror rippled and shimmered and became a window, affording her glimpses of the vivid pink of a tulgey orchard in bloom, the snow-capped mountains where Argine lies, the tangled and unkempt gardens of the Heart estate.

He wanted her to know the beauty of this world she's destined to save, not just the creeping corruption to which it might soon be lost.

Alyssa shivers, thinking about it, and rises unsteadily to her feet. Her arm feels tight and tender, but not unmanageably so. Satisfied that the pain of movement won't bring her to her knees, she sets out in search of Taelor.

The barge runs a supply line from Westport Warren to the town of Thrict. The White Rabbit had told them that as he ushered them on board, though it means a lot more to Alyssa now that she has a rough map of the land unfurling in her head. The towers of crates and pyramids of barrels she passes now will be full of sheep's wool from the Lanate Coast and salt harvested from the Pool of Tears.

And ore, she remembers after a moment, another tatter of childhood memory whispering through her mind. The rabbits of Westport sing iron from the ground, a statement Alyssa had taken at face value when she was four but now supposes must be a poetic way of saying they mine for it.

Funny that Morpheus would teach her something like that, Alyssa thinks as she squeezes between two enormous, rolled-up rugs. Trade routes didn't seem particularly relevant to her goal of saving Wonderland from the Alice taint, but perhaps Morpheus had gotten carried away the way Mr. Mason, Alyssa's art teacher, sometimes erupts into passionate tangents about obscure bits of art history simply because _he_ thinks it interesting.

The path opens abruptly to the exterior edge of the barge, a stretch of flat wood maybe three feet across which ends in a short drop to the glistening, oily waters of the bay. Sunlight glances off the water and seems to hover in a glittering gold haze above it.

And beyond, Alyssa can make out the bristling darkness of trees outlined clearly against the sun-streaked sky. They must be closer to port than she'd expected. She orients herself toward them—toward the bow—and hurries forward, keeping close to the wall of crates at her side. There's no rail to catch her if she slips.

Voices ahead, she realizes in a moment, and quickens her steps until she can hear the words.

"—might be able to, given time, but the Rabbit Hole no longer obeys him as it should." The voice is a rough tenor, male, with an odd habit of clicking its teeth over every consonant. Alyssa peeks around the corner of a pile of large burlap sacks and sees Taelor with her knees drawn up to her chest, listening to a man who looks like he might have been carved from the same wood of the barge. He's about her height and broad, not muscular in the sculpted way that Jeb is but _stout,_ with muscles born, Alyssa thinks, not of routine exercise but hard labor; his skin is brown and flecked with black freckles and scarred pockmarks that might be the remnants of a childhood pox. Luminous reddish-brown eyes bulge out of his head, and he wears his hair in thin, tidy dreadlocks that fall to his shoulders. He gives a little shake of his head. "If he can find its entrance for you, you can return home. Until and unless he can manage that, however…"

And he spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. Taelor hunches her shoulders, shooting an unhappy glance at Alyssa as Alyssa sits wordlessly beside her. "What about mirrors?" she asks. "Alice came through a mirror in _Through the Looking Glass…_ "

The faintly sympathetic smile on the man's face turns incrementally softer. "Returning by mirror would pose significantly more danger to you than remaining in Wonderland, Miss Tremont. Without due preparation and experience, you might leave a chiral behind and never be safe thereafter."

"…A what?"

He closes his eyes and murmurs something in another language, harsh and crackling. " _Kiçdriç._ A reflection that is not—of itself." A frustrated grimace passes over his face. "English doesn't lend itself well to explanations. Ah—you would leave a fragment of yourself behind in the mirror, and it would grow its own mind and hunt you. They are parasites."

A shiver trails down Alyssa's spine. The grim words dislodge another memory and send it wheeling through her mind; she was five and bubbling with impatience to help, and asked Morpheus why she couldn't just step through the mirror and save Wonderland _now._

And he had gazed at her with dark, serious eyes, and told her about chirals.

Mirror-walking had once been safe, in the days when Queen Amaranth ruled. The only way to travel, in fact, and Alyssa remembers the bitter quirk of his lips when he said that.

But then the Alice taint had infected the mirrors.

No one had noticed, at first. Fledgling chirals were indistinguishable from a harmless reflection, and the early symptoms could be dismissed as fits of vanity or anxiousness; who would think twice about an urge to linger in front of mirrors, to _study_ one's appearance instead of merely seeing? Modern Wonderlanders know the signs, but their ancestors had not.

Chirals, fed and strengthened by attention, leapt from their mirrors and burrowed into their living hosts, carving tunnels through their eyes, feasting upon their souls, and always, in the end, taking command of the body.

Yet they weren't _alive,_ not truly, not meant for the solidity of the world on this side of the mirror glass; it eroded their strength as ocean waves erode stone. To sustain themselves, they fed on souls — tore them from their bodies and left the shells to rot, or ransacked the garden of souls to glut themselves on the helpless dead.

Violence followed their emergence, the brutal War of Mirrors that united all of Wonderland around a single goal: hunting down and exterminating chirals before their slaughter could turn Wonderland to a lifeless wasteland. Countless lives were lost, and countless souls shredded, devoured, and when it finally ended and the last chiral fell to Martin Haldrevel's blade, mirror-walking was banned and the mirrors themselves firmly locked.

In time, techniques were developed for slipping in and out of mirrors without leaving any chirals behind, and the ban on mirror-walking eased. But the skill required years of study and still posed a slight risk; few found it worth the danger. An undisciplined child like Alyssa would certainly form a chiral if she set foot in a mirror, even with an experienced mirror-walker like Morpheus to guide her every step. Her quest would need to wait until the Rabbit Hole could be opened…

"Taelor," Alyssa says, quietly cutting through Taelor's protest, "he's right. We can't go back through the mirrors."

Taelor gives her a sharp look. "Your _friend_ spoke to you through a mirror. They can't be that dangerous."

The man answers before Alyssa can. "Morpheus knows the trick of stepping through without… _unravelling_ himself. He holds his component parts together, solid as they are in this world, and nothing can break off and grow into a chiral. It isn't a skill that can be learned quickly." He nods to Alyssa. "Listen to your friend. She knows more of this world than you do, it seems."

 _That_ has Taelor's lips tightening in anger, and Alyssa reaches over to squeeze her wrist before she can say anything unfortunate. "We'll get you home," she says. "I promise, Tae."

 _How long has it been since I called her that? Not since sixth grade, I don't think._

The old nickname works as she hoped, though; Taelor releases a sharp, unhappy breath, shakes her head, and relaxes incrementally. "I—fine. Fine. So we're stuck here for now."

"Right." Alyssa eyes her for another moment, to be sure she understands, and then lifts her gaze to the man. One of the sailors, she supposes; he's leaning now against a large crate, watching them expressionlessly. "I don't think I caught your name."

"Isn't yours to catch," he says, and then smiles faintly. "Cyrus Stenrith, at your service. The barge answers to me."

"Oh." _Is that an odd way of saying he's the captain?_ "Thanks for taking us across the bay."

He nods, and draws breath to say something else, and a low cry comes from further up the barge. Cyrus starts, swinging around to face it just as a rangy young woman skids into view and gasps, "Sir! Port's _swarming_ with Hearts!"

Cyrus _hisses,_ his shoulders tensing. "How many?"

"Full hand, sir. At least," the woman says. "Armed. They've got Aces with them, four that I counted. They want to search our cargo before we can disembark, sir. Say it's one of their routine spot checks."

" _Is_ it?" Cyrus asks, his voice very dry.

"…They have Solsen with them, sir." The woman's gaze flickers over his shoulder and lands on Alyssa for an instant, burning like a live ember.

Cyrus stamps one foot against the deck with a resounding _thud_ and mutters something in his other language. "I see. Her Grace's eyes must see farther than we believed, then." He pauses. "Brace for a fight and let them board. I'll see to the safety of our guests myself."

"I—yes, sir," she says, and whips back the way she came.

Cyrus whirls around, gesturing for them to stand; Alyssa scrambles up, wincing as the hasty movement stings her arm, and hauls Taelor up beside her. "Come with me."

He leads them swiftly through the maze of cargo, speaking over his shoulder in a low voice as he goes. "The Duchess of Hearts has a longstanding enmity with your Morpheus, Miss Gardner. We had hoped to hide your presence in Wonderland much longer than this, for your protection, but—Henrietta Solsen is one of her most devoted agents. If she's here, you can be assured that it's because Her Grace ordered it, and Her Grace doesn't bother herself with trifles like searching for contraband. _You_ are almost certainly the true target of this raid."

They turn a sharp corner in the maze, and come out into open space on the other side of the barge. From here, Alyssa can see a sliver of the port—pale wooden docks, a handful of soldiers in red uniforms and carrying vicious-looking pikes—and a long stretch of the shoreline, separated from them by fifteen or so feet of smooth, glassy water.

"You will have to swim," Cyrus says. "Keep your heads above the water, do not swallow any of it, and do _not_ open your eyes. The minerals in the water will blind you, and burn the soft tissues inside your nose and mouth. When you reach the shore, _run._ Keep the setting sun to your backs, and do not go into the trees. You understand?"

"What will happen to you?" Taelor whispers. When Alyssa glances at her, she's pale and shivering, eyes wide with fear.

Cyrus gives her a thin smile, utterly void of humor. "We'll handle the Hearts and, if necessary, put up a good fight. Don't let worry for us slow your flight." He touches Taelor's shoulder, and then Alyssa's, as if conferring a blessing. " _Go_. Eyes shut, remember."

Taelor squeezes her eyes shut and slips into the water. Alyssa hesitates long enough to take a deep, steadying breath, and follows her.


	10. wait for heroes to fall from the sky

**TEN.** _WAIT FOR HEROES TO FALL FROM THE SKY._

Slick, oily water closes over her legs, torso, arms, and pain lashes at her like a whip. Alyssa releases a shocked, spluttering gasp, floundering to keep her head and the bottle from the Pool of Tears above the surface. The water feels like acid on her burns and sets fire to a a constellation of tiny cuts and scrapes she hadn't known existed.

Involuntary tears leak between her closed eyelids as she kicks away from the barge and begins a one-armed paddle toward the shore. Alyssa doubts she'd be able to see through them even if she dared open her eyes.

 _Don't scream. Don't splash. Don't make a sound._

She pours all her focus into forward motion, following the slight ripples of Taelor's wake and forcing herself to breathe slowly, evenly. The bay laps at her chin, droplets of water speckling her cheeks and stinging when they touch her lips.

 _Don't cry out._

They haven't been spotted yet. Or at least, Alyssa can't hear the commotion she imagines will follow if they're seen. The quiet worries her; besides the low slopping of water around them and the pulse of blood in her ears, there's nothing, _nothing._

Her toes scrape against something solid and prickly, and when she kicks again, her other foot comes down in a patch of soft, sucking mud. It peels her sock off when she pulls herself free.

 _Almost there._

Alyssa surges forward, eager to get out of the stinging water and slink out of sight of the barge, and her knee slams into something hard and sharp as broken glass. It tears through her leggings like they're made of tissue and claw into the skin underneath, and then water sears the sears the fresh wound like white-hot needles. The cry of pain she's worked so hard to suppress rips free. Taelor snatches at her shoulder, hissing for her to _shut up we're at the shore come on—_

Too late.

As Alyssa staggers out of the water, bent double and wheezing with pain, a high voice shouts behind them.

" _There!_ On the beach!"

She freezes, gaze locked with Taelor's for one horrible, heart-stopping second. Taelor's fingers dig into her shoulder while the color drains from her face.

Alyssa shoves at her. " _GO!_ "

Taelor stumbles, turns, then launches forward, pelting up the beach without a backward glance. Alyssa cranes her neck just long enough to get an impression of red-clad soldiers streaming away from the dock, toward them, before hurtling after her.

Agony lances through her knee and up her thigh and for a moment, Alyssa feels it'll give out beneath her and send her toppling into the slippery black mud underfoot, but she catches her balance and throws herself forward again, and in the next couple strides the pain blurs beneath a spike of adrenaline. More shouting breaks out behind her, and the ringing sound of metal crashing against metal, and terrified determination to escape lends lightness to her feet.

There's a low stone wall at the top of the beach. Alyssa vaults over it and crashes to her knees on the other side. White spots bloom and burst and fade in her eyes and she's up again, staggering at first but gaining speed until she's sprinting full tilt after her own shadow. _East._

Trees soar out of the ground to her left, but the land ahead opens in a flat, wide plain. Scrubby vegetation swipes at her bare feet and legs as she runs, but she _won't_ trip, _refuses_ to trip. She's never run like this before—her legs pump harder and harder and she's drawing even with Taelor despite the other girl's longer legs and head start. The pain of her tattered knee and the burns sloughs away, blotted out by shrieking fear about what happens if they're caught.

Air burns her lungs like dry ice. Her vision tunnels to a singular, bright point on the horizon. Some detached, unfeeling part of her whispers that she can't keep up this pace much longer; Alyssa tells it to shut up.

They are _going to make it,_ and absolute certainty buoys her steps in the instant before a second stream of red erupts from the trees ahead.

Hearts.

They fan out towards her and Taelor. Ten of them, wielding glaives that glitter like blood in the twilight.

Alyssa screams and locks her knees, throws her weight backward, and skids to a stop mere inches before her own momentum would've impaled her on one of the glaives. She topples over, slamming shoulder-first into a prickly shrub that is, at least, a softer landing than the dry earth. Next to her, Taelor keeps her footing, but only just.

The Hearts encircle them in eerie silence.

They aren't the silly card soldiers of the cartoon but actual people, all of them clad in crimson gambesons with small white hearts stitched into the sleeves—rank markers, Alyssa thinks dizzily. The Ace, a slight, olive-skinned woman with vivid yellow eyes, wears a white breastplate over her gambeson. A messy heart is slapped across the chest in red paint.

Alyssa focuses on that instead of the Ace's hawkish stare as the she rests the barbed tip of her glaive on Alyssa's collarbone and says, "Alyssa Gardner?"

Alyssa is too busy gulping air to answer, but the Ace seems to take her panting silence as an affirmative. Or maybe she wasn't expecting a reply at all. She cocks her head, and continues, "By order of Her Majesty the Queen of Hearts, you and your… companion"—her merciless gaze flicks to Taelor for an instant, then returns to Alyssa—"are to present yourself to the Court at Argine for trial."

The glaive pricks the hollow of Alyssa's throat as she sucks in another lungful of air. Her whole chest _burns_ with the need for it. "On—what—charges?"

"For a start?" The tilt of the Ace's head grows more severe. She blinks once, slowly. "Unauthorized entry. Mingling with undesirables." Taelor makes an incredulous noise at that, but fortunately the Ace ignores her. "Conspiring with dissidents against Her Majesty's rule." Her eyes glitter coldly. "Plotting regicide. No doubt Her Majesty and Her Grace of Hearts will find additional charges, should those prove insufficient."

"We haven't _done anything,_ " Taelor says. "I, for one, didn't _ask_ to get dragged into this mess. I just want to go home."

The Ace glances at her again, and for the first time, Alyssa sees a flicker of something other than steely disinterest in her expression. "You may be sent home, if you can persuade the court of that. Her Majesty is not unreasonable. Your arrest, however, is non-negotiable. Her Grace gave orders that you were to be killed, if we couldn't capture you alive." A rather wry smile appears on her lips. "She takes no chances with the Queen's safety."

"The _Queen of Hearts_ is not unreasonable?!" Taelor hisses, hysteria bubbling in her voice.

"Mm." The Ace gives a tiny shrug, and the cold mask drops over her face again. She turns back to Alyssa and prods her with the glaive. "On your feet, Gardner."

Slowly, hyperaware of the blade against her neck and a litany of pains making themselves known again as her adrenaline high ebbs, Alyssa shuffles off of her shrub and clambers awkwardly to her feet, listing as far to the right as she can without falling. She has no desire whatsoever to test her injured knee at this point; already it feels like it's been flayed.

The Ace glances at it and lifts an eyebrow. "Can you walk on that?"

Alyssa shakes her head. She's _really_ feeling it now: sharp, electric shocks that keep time with her heartbeat, and a ripping sensation when she moves. Any vestiges of tolerance for the pain are gone.

Frowning, the Ace turns to the Heart beside her—a pale, brawny woman at least twice her size, with a crooked nose and deep scowl—and days, "Do you think—"

But whatever she means to ask is lost beneath a strangled, gurgling cry and tremendous _THUMP_ from the other side of the circle. Alyssa twists around to see, steps on her injured leg, and crumples with a howl; lights flash and pop in her eyes and barbed claws rip through her knee, but she can hear shouting and trampling feet, a sickening _wet_ noise she thinks might be the sound of a blade sliding through human flesh.

Then her vision stops swimming, and she looks up—

 _Morpheus._

One Heart is already down, and Alyssa watches, open-mouthed, as Morpheus wrenches a glaive from the gut of a second, and then spins with unearthly grace to block a blow from a third. Three glaives swing at him all at once as the other Hearts close in, and he leaps and _twists,_ his body coiling inwards like a retracting spring—and suddenly he's a moth the size of Alyssa's hand, soaring above while the glaives sweep through empty air beneath him.

He changes back between one flap of his glossy black wings and the next, resuming his human form with an audible _snap_. Feet and glaive lash out as he drops, catching one Heart a heavy blow across the neck and slashing open the chest of another.

Both of them lay motionless where they fall. The six Hearts remaining rush him, and Alyssa's heart crawls into her throat when they close into a wall of red, blocking him from her view.

But there's one cry, and then another, and the line of Hearts cracks as another of their number fall. Through the gap, she sees Morpheus sweep a sixth Heart off his feet with a whirl of the glaive, and then plunge it into his neck before he can recover. A choked scream, an arc of blood as Morpheus tears the glaive free, and the Heart spasms and dies.

And then there are four.

The Ace whistles shrilly, and the survivors retreat out of range of the glaive. Morpheus spins the weapon in his hands as if contemplating where to strike next as he moves to position himself between them and Alyssa.

"How many times," Morpheus says, "must I send the Queen's _dogs_ running with tail between legs before she learns better?"

"We aren't running," the Ace breathes. Blood streams down her face from a gash over her brow, and her yellow eyes are bright with loathing.

"Consider," Morpheus says in a low drawl, "that I felled six of your hand in under a minute. Consider that you and yours failed to so much as scratch me in the same." He cants his head to the side and tuts mockingly. "Need I take your whole eye to drive the lesson home, Captain—Cordella, isn't it?"

A nerve in the Ace's jaw twitches. "This is not over."

"It never is," Morpheus says, sounding bored. "Go. Report to your mistresses, unless you'd rather I give you the mercy of a quick death."

She hisses at him, but at a shake of her head, the three Hearts at her side lower their glaives and retreat, melting into the forest as swiftly as they appeared. The Ace lingers a moment longer, stony rage written over her face.

Then she steps back, shrugs her shoulders, and folds herself into the body of a hawk. Alyssa has an impression of tawny feathers and a razor-sharp beak, the beating of powerful wings, and then she's gone: a dark silhouette against the lilac sky, shrinking rapidly as she glides away over the treetops.

Silence settles in her wake. Morpheus tosses his glaive aside with a contemptuous scoff and turns. A single stride carries him to Alyssa's side, where he kneels, his deep black eyes intent on her face. "How are you hurt?"

Alyssa thinks he should be able to _see_ that perfectly fine, but she swallows the sarcastic answer and says, "Burns from the Pool of Tears. And I cut my knee on something in the bay."

"More than a mere cut, by the look of it," Morpheus murmurs, delicately running a fingertip down her shin. Even that contact, indirect and gentle as it is, makes her knee blaze with pain, and Alyssa lets out a sharp, gasp. He shakes his head. "You're in for a rough night, luv."

" _Ex_ cuse me," Taelor says, sounding no less hysterical than she did when speaking to the Ace. "But who the _hell_ are you? And—and—"

"Morpheus," he replies, not even bothering to look her way. "Leader of the resistance in these parts. Surely dear Alyssa didn't neglect to mention me? The real question—"

"You _killed_ those people!"

This time, Morpheus _does_ look over his shoulder, catching and holding Taelor's gaze for a few seconds. "Would you rather I had let them drag you to Argine?" he asks. "Left you to the meager mercy of the Queen's guillotine?"

Taelor flushes, and says nothing.

"You oughtn't interrupt unless you've something important to say," Morpheus adds. "It wastes Time, and he doesn't take kindly to that. _As_ I was saying, the real question is: _who_ are _you?_ "

"…Friend of Alyssa's," Taelor mutters.

"Her name's Taelor," Alyssa says, casting her an exasperated glance. "She sort of—fell in with me by mistake."

Morpheus scowls. "That isn't supposed to _happen._ "

"Well, _so sorry,_ but the ground sort of fell—"

He waves her explanation away. "The Rabbit Hole isn't meant to allow more than a single Abovegrounder to pass through it at a time. That it did is only another sign of how far the corruption has spread. Our time grows ever shorter." A shadow passes across his face, and then he shakes it away, replaces it with a grim smile, and flicks his cravat away from his neck with a few quick, tidy movements of his fingers. He leans down to fasten it around Alyssa's knee, a makeshift bandage in navy-blue paisley. The soft fabric stings as it settles over the wound, but Alyssa supposes that's preferable to leaving it exposed. "I've a mouthful of concentrate of the agate bolete with me," he says. "It'll make you small, and I can carry you from here as a moth. My home isn't far from here, as I fly. You, my dear"—he throws another glance at Taelor—"will need to proceed on foot. I'm afraid I didn't anticipate needing a second dose."

"But—"

"Continue east until you see a tower flying blue banners—it's about a mile on—then enter and tell the Owl that Morpheus sent you and you are to be moved to the sanctuary post-haste."

Taelor draws a sharp breath and opens her mouth to protest, but Morpheus adds, "Unless you'd rather stay here and try your luck with the Hearts, of course," and she closes it again with a soft _click._

"I thought not," Morpheus murmurs.

He slips a slender hand into the pocket of his leather coat and emerges with a crystal vial the size as Alyssa's pinky, which he uncorks and hands over to Alyssa. By the smell, it's the same stuff she and Taelor drank beneath the Pool of Tears. With a resigned sigh, she tilts the liquid into her mouth and swallows.

As before, her spine collapses like a telescope first, and then there's the rush of air and sensation of falling. Morpheus and Taelor grow to gargantuan size; the scrubby vegetation rockets past her until it looms overhead like a vast, ancient forest.

Then the huge black mass that is all she can see of Morpheus wavers, blinks, folds in on itself, and _changes_ ; at her present size, his moth form is big as a carthorse, with vast wings like sails made of black velvet. The swirling wind they stir up as he flutters to the ground just ahead of her nearly blows her off her feet.

He's covered in bristling black fur, which glistens an iridescent blue where the light strikes it; Alyssa's first, ridiculous thought is _I'm going to make a mosaic of him when I get back home._

She shakes her head, setting that thought aside, and half-limps, half-crawls up the rounded slope of his back. There's a little hollow right behind the place where his wings attach, and Alyssa gingerly settles herself into it. Vaguely, she remembers reading that it's bad for moths to lose the delicate hairs that cover their bodies, so she's wary of pulling it out—but an exploratory tug reveals that it's much stronger than she expects.

One of his long, furred antennae twitches, as if to warn her, and she presses herself flat against his back and grabs two fistfuls of the soft, silky hair.

The enormous wings snap up. For an instant, she feels encased in some sort of velvety black cocoon, warm fur beneath her and wings enfolding her on all sides; then they beat down and Alyssa yells, half in terror and half in exhilaration, as the force of their acceleration snaps her head back. And then—

And then they're airborne.

His wings billow and undulate, carving through the air and hurling him forward and _up_ , and when Alyssa cranes her neck to see over his wings, she sees the land rolling out beneath them, the treetops of the Frangible Forest shrinking into a mottled patch of green which encroaches on the heath, which unfurls in a rolling sea of purple heather splattered by yellow-orange patches of gorse.

It isn't at all like looking out an airplane window, as Alyssa would've probably imagined it to be if she'd thought about it before they took off. Wind roars past her face and sends her braid streaming behind her like a flag, and the world seems closer and _huger_ than it does from an airplane. Morpheus banks to the left, and she catches a glimpse of Taelor—almost normal in size, from this height, jogging east with a resigned expression on her face.

After a moment, Alyssa becomes aware that she's laughing from the sheer exhilaration of flight, and tries to stop, and then she thinks, _Why shouldn't I?_ and throws her head back and gives herself fully over to the laughter. This is a hundred, a _thousand_ times better than the thrill of popping an ollie on her skateboard.

Morpheus tilts an antenna back and flicks it against her forehead. His voice whispers through her mind, as clear as if he'd spoken aloud: _Close your eyes._

"Why?"

 _We're about to jump, luv, and I'd rather you didn't lose your mind to the screaming horror of it._ Even in her thoughts, she can hear the trace of dry amusement in his tone.

Puzzled but obedient, she shuts her eyes.

Morpheus shudders like an airplane caught in a turbulent current of air, and Alyssa yelps as her injured knee jolts and a line of fire streaks through her leg, and—

It all _stops._

The sensation of light beyond her closed eyelids. The air rushing past and snatching the breath from her mouth, and the sound of it whistling in her ears. _Gone._

Alyssa thinks she screams, but she can't hear that either.

Feelings she'd never even been _aware_ of before vanish: the light pull of air pouring into her throat, the weight of an atmosphere bearing down on her shoulders, the omnipresent strain of her muscles against gravity—

There's _nothing nothing nothing_ except Morpheus's silky fur and the sizzling pain in her knee, and even that feels distant and false, like something out of a dream.

 _This is what death feels like,_ she thinks, and this time she _knows_ that her mouth is stretched in a silent, horrified scream.

She has no idea how long it lasts. They seem to hang suspended forever in absolute emptiness while her lungs burn because there's no air to fill them when she tries to inhale, and her skin feels leathery and stiff and _dead,_ and no matter how hard she squeezes her eyes shut, she can never convince herself that it's simple darkness surrounding her.

And then Morpheus rolls, and the world of the living reasserts itself with a slap of cool, damp wind and the piercing sound of her own screams. Alyssa snaps her eyes open again and sobs in relief at the confused blur of color and light that greets her.

 _It's over. It's over._

Into her thoughts, Morpheus whispers, _Well done, luv. You survived the Dark Country. And now we're almost home—look!_

She looks.

Her vision clears and she realizes that they're no longer flying over the open heath, but through a long, deep gorge. Dark cliffs sweep up to the left and right, blotting her view of everything save the dusky purple sky directly above. A glittering river snakes through the gorge, and the land between its banks and the stone walls of the gorge looks wild, untamed. Long grass wars with rambling thickets and drooping willow trees; here and there, Alyssa thinks she sees luminous green eyes peering out of the shadows.

Just ahead lies a small copse of trees, coming nearer with every sweep of Morpheus's wings. In a moment, it's beneath them, the treetops racing by so close that Alyssa can see the shape of individual leaves: tear-shaped, pale green, with serrated edges.

A moment more, and Morpheus begins a swift, spiraling descent that carries them _through_ the treetops—

Which dissipate like smoke as they pass, becoming the empty air above a small clearing. Morpheus soars over a stretch of overgrown lawn broken up by curving, shrubby hedges, over an iron table set for tea.

Alyssa looks up and catches her breath.

Ahead of them, rising at the edge of the clearing, stands a tree, a tower— _both,_ she sees as Morpheus's flight carries them closer. Decades or centuries ago, someone had planted a ring of saplings and grafted them all together so they grew enmeshed, and now the trees are braided and woven tightly together. The tower walls ripple with dozens of different shades, different patterns of bark—pale, smooth white melting into craggy brown, fibrous red, orderly grey. Every so often the trunks separate, bending into the shape of windows large and small. Soft, golden light shines through the gaps.

"You live here?" Alyssa whispers.

 _Aye._

His wings flutter, and he bobs almost in place for a moment, as if to let her savor the sight. The roof of the tower is its own forest, innumerable trees all growing as one and erupting in a magnificent crown of leaves of all sizes, all shapes, all colors.

Then Morpheus angles his wings, and bears them up toward the highest of the tower's many windows. There's a clear note of satisfaction in his tone when he says, _Welcome to Rethen House, luv._


	11. all the things you used to know

**AN:** hi! i'm not dead, this chapter was just an absolute pain in the ass to write. it's a lotta talking, lotta exposition, lays a lot of important groundwork for the rest of the story, and it kept trying to be boring. it's still not perfect but i'm sick of writing it, so. here. hope you like it.

in the interest of making absolutely sure nobody's confused: the queen involved here isn't splintered's queen red. she's a musical-verse OC of mine retooled a bit to suit the basic beats of our crossover plot. think less wrathful vengeance, more well intentioned extremism.

sorry for the long wait. as ever, thanks for reading, and comments are greatly appreciated.

* * *

 **ELEVEN.** _ALL THE THINGS YOU USED TO KNOW._

Morpheus lays her out on a faded davenport and tells her not to move until he returns. Alyssa melts into the cushions and, just for a moment, closes her eyes.

She's never felt so wrung-out in her life. Every part of her aches around the fiery beacons of her burns and her knee and exhaustion irradiates her whole body, but she feels compelled to stay awake, if only for a little longer.

Her eyelids droop. The cushions feel wonderfully comfortable...

For some time she drifts through a soft, liminal haze between sleep and waking. She has the vague sense of floating in darkness—of murmuring voices overhead—of time stretching and distorting weirdly in the instant before she opens her eyes again.

She blinks, and finds Morpheus kneeling at her side, his fingertips cool against her temple. "Welcome back, luv," he murmurs. Then he nods, directing Alyssa's attention to the woman standing beside him.

She's slender and fine-boned, a study in contrasts: skin like black calla lilies, white hair wound in intricate braids around her head, twin slashes of brilliant orange paint outlining her eyes and the long bridge of her nose. When she smiles, Alyssa feels the vestige of some long-forgotten memory stirring in the back of her mind.

Morpheus says, "This is my associate, Ivory Oloris. Or, should you wish to be formal, Her Grace of Clubs."

 _The Duchess…_

Gingerly, Ivory settles onto the edge of the davenport, reaching to peel the cravat covering Alyssa's knee away with an expression of faint disapproval. "We're well beyond formality by now," she says. "Hello, Alyssa."

Alyssa rubs at her face, trying to scrub away the lingering fog of exhaustion. _Something_ here doesn't add up. "I… thought the duchesses were all loyal to the Queen of Hearts?"

" _Were,_ yes, when you last encountered Wonderland," Ivory replies, her lips thinning. She draws a small silver jar from a satchel at her hip and begins to daub the contents onto Alyssa's knee; the pain eases at once, and Alyssa sighs, relieved. "But the decks, as it were, have since been… rather vigorously shuffled."

"A delicate way of putting it," Morpheus mutters with a snort.

"What happened?"

"The Hatter happened," Ivory mutters as she replaces the cap on the jar and begins to rummage around in her satchel. "She took over the Tea Party eleven years ago and transformed it into a powerhouse, and now…"

"Little happens in Wonderland without the Hatter's approval," Morpheus says.

"Indeed." From her satchel, Ivory produces a spiraling bit of metal—like something cut from a wrought iron fence—and then a vial of clear liquid, which she uncorks and pours unceremoniously over Alyssa's knee. "Under her command, the Tea Party grew from a ramshackle little table to an institution to rival the Royal Court and the Great Houses, and a hub of innovation and trade. All with Her Majesty's support and approval."

Morpheus nods. "She's the Royal Minister of Trade, the Duchess of Hearts, the Steward of the Land Beyond the Looking Glass, and the Queen's most trusted advisor... She has Northwood Warren in her pocket, and myriad supporters among the Great Houses of Eastmarsh and Sudheath. Access to the laboratories in her citadel beyond the Looking Glass is a coveted prize among lower-ranking Diamonds despite the personal enmity between their Duchess and the Hatter, and a considerable number of Hearts quietly look to her, rather than the Queen, as their true leader."

Ivory spins the piece of iron three times between her hands, then sets it atop Alyssa's knee. It tingles; she pulls a roll of gauze out of her satchel and begins to bandage the whole thing up. "By any measure," she says, "the Hatter is one of the most powerful figures in Wonderland—second only to the Queen herself."

Alyssa chews her lip as she digests all this. "The White Rabbit warned me to stay away from her," she says at last. "And… if she's the Duchess of Hearts, that means she's the one who tried to have Taelor and me arrested."

"Good. You've been paying attention." Approval glitters in Morpheus's eyes. "Yes, there's little lost between myself and the Hatter, and she would very much like to be rid of _you._ Setting Wonderland to rights would restore the balance of power between the Royal Court and the Great Houses, and by extension, topple the Hatter. Alas…"

He hesitates, then, looking away from her to frown across the parlor, and Alyssa says, "What? What is it?"

Morpheus shakes his head and waves the question away. "Later, luv. These things must be told in the proper order—and presently, I think it's high time we refreshed your memory. I _did_ promise to explain everything once you arrived in Wonderland, did I not?" As Alyssa nods, he fishes a glossy deck of cards from the pocket of his waistcoat and fans them out with a flourish. "How's the leg, my dear?"

Ivory clicks her tongue and murmurs, "She'll be walking by morning, so long as you take care not to jostle it."

"But of course. Many thanks." Morpheus dips his head in a shallow suggestion of a bow as Ivory rises from the davenport and murmurs a goodbye. Once she's gone, he catches Alyssa's eye again and says, "Pick a card, luv."

Puzzled, Alyssa draws one and flips it over.

Then she blinks. "It's—"

"The Joker," Morpheus says with a wink.

"It's _you,_ " Alyssa says as she tilts the card to the light. The illustration, done in shadowy watercolors, is unmistakably Morpheus: Dressed in tattered black leggings and a tight-fitting red jerkin, his blue-black hair concealed beneath a scarlet fool's cap with four long, slender tails; a flurry of cards soars over his head in a perfect arc, thrown from one pale hand to the other.

Morpheus smiles, collapsing the fan with a flick of his wrist, then teases out and flips over a second card with his thumb. "And the Queen," he says. "The chief players in our little tale."

Her portrait is exquisite in detail. The artist picked out the faint blonde lashes fringing her eyes, the soft dusting of freckles across her cheeks, the delicate thorny vines embossed on her leather cuirass and the paisley pattern embroidered in subtle shades of red on the sleeves of her crimson tunic. She lounges on a throne cut from some black stone, grasping in one hand the hilt of a longsword whose heart-shaped pommel marks her suit; the jagged black crown perched amid her riotously curly, strawberry blonde hair has a glassy sheen more like obsidian than any metal, and she looks…

 _Melancholy,_ Alyssa decides after a moment.

"Queen Amaranth," Morpheus breathes, almost reverent. "Our second Queen of Hearts, and the greatest among them all. It was she who ruled when Alice Liddell came to Wonderland, and she whose vanishing precipitated our long decline." He pauses. "I was but a humble jester then, on the cusp of my chrysalis."

"…Wait. You _knew_ her?"

"I've aged rather well," Morpheus says dryly. "We're coming to that, luv—and in the meantime, you'd do well not to interrupt."

"…Sorry."

He plucks the Joker out of her hand and twirls it between his fingertips, smiling. "As I said, I was a caterpillar of minimal importance on the day Alice Liddell came to Wonderland, but I was there when she arrived in the Queen's gardens…"

Alyssa catches her breath.

As the Joker revolves one last time around his thumb and topples onto the deck in his other hand, the illustration peels away and comes to life—a shimmering ghost no taller than Alyssa's index finger who makes his own deck of cards tumble and whirl with a strange, fluid grace. For a moment, Alyssa just watches the minuscule performance, fascinated.

Then the real Morpheus slings the Queen of Hearts into the air, and she, too, clambers gracefully out of her card at the apex of its arc. She raises one gloved hand, and more misty figures begin to appear. Heart soldiers, courtiers, gardeners, rosebushes, topiaries, hedgehogs…

Last of all comes Alice: a pale, solemn-looking child with messy brown hair in a wrinkled and grass-stained dress.

Morpheus fans his cards again, and the little figures leap into place like players upon a stage, acting out the parts of the story Alyssa already knows: The frantic painting of roses and the mad game of croquet that follows. "Carroll's account of all this is accurate in the essentials," Morpheus tells her, as the hazy foliage of the croquet grounds melt into a courtroom and a pair of guards drag a man forward in chains. "The Knave of Hearts had just been implicated in a string of thefts, and all was chaos as Queen Amaranth sought to sort the matter out. A common occurrence, then; those were fractious times.

"However, when little Alice came forward to give her testimony…"

He collapses the fan with a little _snap,_ and the pantomime freezes. Alice stands hunched in the witness stand, while the Queen looms above, having risen and slammed her hand against the judge's bench to quell the excited chatter that had broken out when the White Rabbit called Alice as a witness.

"No one could agree, afterwards, just _what_ had happened, for no two people in that courtroom saw the same thing." Morpheus sighs, very softly. "The only certainty was that both Alice and Queen Amaranth had vanished. King Finvarra mounted a search that lasted for months and turned the whole of Wonderland inside-out, but no trace was ever found and, in the end, he gave it up and declared Queen Amaranth dead.

"It being unlawful for men to rule in Wonderland, he was then obliged to find a new Queen. He chose Amaranth's step-sister, Grenadine, a woman of boundless good intentions but a fatal absence of common sense. Little more than a puppet, in truth. She ruled for almost sixty years while the Duchesses and the elders of the Great Houses squabbled over her strings, and when she died—well, her corpse scarcely had time to cool before the conflict broke into open war."

A brittle smile, quite empty of humor, crosses Morpheus's face. "Around that time, quite by accident, I found a letter hidden away in a forgotten corner of the royal archives—a letter penned by none other than Queen Amaranth herself, on the eve of her disappearance. And so I learnt the truth.

"Alice Liddell never left Wonderland, you see. She hit her head at the bottom of the Rabbit Hole and died within seconds of her arrival."

Alyssa blinks. "But—what? I thought—"

Morpheus flicks a card out of the deck. It spins away from him, slicing through the tableau of the courtroom and shredding everything but the ghostly figures of the Queen and Alice, then curves around like a boomerang and returns to his waiting palm.

As it settles, the Queen begins to move again, striding over to Alice and kneeling before her. She clasps the girl's arms in a startlingly maternal gesture, and Morpheus murmurs, "Children do not die in Wonderland, Alyssa. That's an ancient decree, passed by a queen long since dead and upheld by every queen since. You could fling a Wonderlander child from the cliffs of Argine and they would bounce up at the bottom, dust themselves off, and run along, no worse for wear—until they reach adulthood, they are impervious to harm."

"But Alice…?"

"Alice, alas, was _not_ a Wonderlander child. She fell down the Rabbit Hole as fragile as any Abovegrounder child and—the White Rabbit not being there ease her fall, as he did for you and your friend—she shattered at the bottom. And yet, as a child _in_ Wonderland, she wasn't allowed to die—can you see where this leads, luv?"

"…So… as long as Alice… _stayed_ in Wonderland, she'd live?" Alyssa guesses. "But then… if she went back home…"

"Aye. Wonderland healed her and swept away the memories of her pain, but it could last only as long as she stayed here. Death still awaited her in England. Had she ever returned…" He shakes his head. "Queen Amaranth recognized the problem and spirited Alice through the Looking Glass, to live out her life in our sister land—where neither King Finvarra nor any of his search parties could ever find her."

As he speaks, the Queen takes Alice by the hand and leads her to a sprawling building which must, from the number of other children running around, be either an orphanage or a school. Alice weeps, then rages, then at last falls asleep cradled in the Queen's arms; the Queen spends some time stroking her hair before handing her over to another woman.

Then the orphanage and its flock of children dissipate into nothing, so that only the Queen remains.

"…But… Alice Liddell didn't die," Alyssa says after a moment. "She must've grown up and had kids of her own, because Alis—Mom and I are descended from her."

"For this part," Morpheus replies, "I'd like to show you a memory."

He leans closer, reaching out to brush his fingertips against her temple; a sharp shock races down Alyssa's spine as their eyes meet. It's like gazing into the shadowy and unknowable darkness of a well—deep, deep black, deep enough to drown in…

"Will you let me in, Alyssa?" he murmurs.

This is— this is— Alyssa isn't quite sure _what_ this is, but she likes the way it makes her heart beat faster, and she can feel an old, forgotten sense of a connection lost and mourned stirring in the back of her mind. The burned bridges Morpheus spoke of, maybe.

She nods, hesitant, and Morpheus smiles.

And the parlor flakes away, piece by piece…

* * *

Morpheus presses his back to the wall and screws up his eyes against the rain. This downpour isn't a patch on a Wonderland thunderstorm, but even so—his sprint across the lawn soaked him to the bone.

 _Fennine's light,_ he isn't meant for this sort of thing.

He slinks cautiously along the side of the house. It's all dark inside, which strikes him as a hopeful sign—though the phenomenal roar of the rain on the roof makes him uneasy, for if someone in the house begins to stir, he's unlikely to hear it.

And _here's_ the front door, sturdy wood slick with rain! Morpheus crouches on the low stoop, slipping a tension wrench and pick from his pocket. After a moment's fiddling, the lock opens with a tiny _snick,_ and he lets himself into the shadowy, carpeted foyer.

Shaking rainwater out of his eyes, he pulls the folded scrap of oilcloth from inside his waistcoat and shakes it open. The Queen of Hearts, kept safe and dry inside the oilcloth, falls face up into his palm. Morpheus can feel it quivering faintly.

 _She's here._

"Find her," he breathes.

The card floats into the air and then, bobbing like a leaf on the breeze, drifts deeper into the house. Morpheus creeps after it.

It leads him down the hall, past a carpeted staircase, and then whisks under a closed door at the northernmost corner of the house. The doorknob squeaks when Morpheus tries it, but it turns easily enough and the door swings open with a whisper of oiled hinges.

As he steps inside, the sticky-sweet smell of sickness assaults his nose, making his eyes water and his stomach curl. The darkness seems somehow thicker now—a deep, formless gloom he cannot make sense of.

He hears a faint, wheezing breath, and then the quiet click of a lamp. Yellow light blazes into his eyes, blinding him as he yelps, and for a moment he stands helpless, blinking the spots out of his vision.

"Now, there's a face I never thought to see again."

The voice is creaking and faded, punctuated at the end by another labored breath, and as his eyes clear, Morpheus finds its owner gazing back at him with watery amusement.

She is different than he expects. Older. Age and a peaceful life Aboveground have softened her, slumped her shoulders, thinned her hair—even so, she sits in her wheelchair with the same regal air he remembers from his youth. His card dangles between her fingers, all the life gone out of it now that it's found its likeness.

"Your Majesty—" he begins.

"Mrs. Hargreaves, please." Amaranth gives him a rather piercing look, and then adds, "I presume you've broken into my home for a good reason, lad."

Morpheus offers her a little bow. "Mrs. Hargreaves, then. My name is Morpheus, and I've come to ask you to return to Wonderland, and rule us once more."

There is a very long pause, during which Amaranth frowns pensively at him, tapping the card against the arm of her wheelchair. At length she says, "No."

"N—pardon?"

Her eyebrows rise. "I've lived a long, full, contented life here," she says, "and now I'm old and dying. I should like to do so at home, among family."

"Wonderland could heal—"

"I do not _want_ to be healed," she says sharply, shaking her head. "No. I've little desire to return to Wonderland, and less to take up a crown that was never mine by right. What possible reason could you have for asking?"

Sighing, Morpheus slips a hand into his waistcoat and pulls out the letter—old, wrinkled, bearing the marks of age and fire, but still as legible as the day it was written. "This," he whispers, holding it out to her. She accepts it, and he pretends not to notice the tremor in her hands. "It's the letter you wrote to King Finvarra, to tell him of where you had gone and to whom the crown ought to pass. I suspect that he tried to burn it, and when that failed he hid it away and let it lie forgotten. I found it by accident only a week ago."

The color drains from Amaranth's face as she unfolds it slowly, touching her fingertips to the singes left by her husband's long-ago betrayal. "What became of Eleonora, then?"

"She's dead, Your—Mrs. Hargreaves," Morpheus tells her. "Slain by marauders in the Frangible Forest, though I wouldn't be surprised to learn King Finvarra had a hand in it." He pauses. "He placed your stepsister on the throne instead."

"Grenadine? That fool couldn't—" Amaranth breaks herself off with a jerky shake of her head, crumpling the letter in her fist. "And now?"

"Both he and Grenadine are dead, and their child faces a bitter war of succession. The Duchess of Spades was the first to challenge her claim, but the others were swift to follow. And in the meanwhile the common folk suffer."

That's the way to win her, he thinks. Not by appealing to a lust for power dwindled away to nothing over the last sixty years, nor by stoking the fires of a once notoriously quick temper, but…

"We are without a genuine Queen at a time when we desperately need one," he says, moving to kneel before her chair. "Please, Mrs. Hargreaves."

She turns her head away, her eyes closed, and for a moment sits so motionless that only the ragged sound of her breathing confirms she still lives. Morpheus waits, his heart thumping in his chest. If she says no...

But at last she sighs, her head bowing, and says, "Very well."

Morpheus rises at once, not wanting to allow her time to change her mind. Amaranth clutches at his neck when he lifts her out of the wheelchair, muffling her pained coughs in the crook of his shoulder; he flicks the card into the emptied wheelchair, and at a word from him, it transforms into a perfect facsimile—accurate down to the last hair, though its eyes are closed and the rise and fall of its chest almost imperceptible.

It will linger for a few days, seemingly insensible, before slipping away into death.

Then he turns off the lamp, adjusts his hold on her to ease her ragged breathing, and slips quietly out of the bedroom—down the hall, past the staircase, and out again into the cold rain. Amaranth gives a little grunt of discomfort as they emerge, her fingers digging into the side of his neck, but otherwise stays quiet.

The tidy lawn outside feels dangerously slick underfoot as Morpheus hastens away from the house. Fifteen feet, twenty, sliding and stumbling through the darkness—and then the deeper shadows of the trees bordering the lawn swallows him, and he sees the pale smear of the Rabbit crouching just ahead.

"You took your sweet time," the Rabbit hisses at him. "I thought—"

"You think too much," Morpheus snaps. Amaranth is shivering in his arms now, her breathing heavy and broken by a wet, shuddering cough that worries him. "Open the Rabbit Hole, _quickly._ We may not have much time."

To his credit, the Rabbit doesn't argue, nor take offense at his brusque tone. He pounds a fist against the trunk of the largest tree, which clanks in a mechanical sort of way and splits open at the roots. A hot draft pours out of the opening; the dense, earthy smell of it makes Morpheus's nose twitch.

"Follow me!"

"Mind your head, Your Majesty," Morpheus murmurs as he complies. He thinks he hears a whispered _Mrs. Hargreaves_ in return, but it's lost in another cough.

Then it's a swift plunge through dusty darkness, for the Rabbit takes them down at near terminal speeds and dumps them—with little warning, and a tremendous _THUMP_ —into the royal bedchamber. Morpheus staggers at the impact but keeps his feet, muttering curses under his breath.

He'd planned for trouble from young Queen Milgranda at this juncture, braced himself to subdue her or, in the worst case, kill; but their sudden, noisy entrance seems not to have woken her—she lies quite still on her bed, curled catlike beneath the covers.

 _Small mercies._

Milgranda doesn't stir as he settles Amaranth on the padded stool in front of her vanity, then tiptoes to the stand where the royal crown rests.

…Where the royal crown _should_ rest.

He has but an instant to register its absence and begin to panic before he hears an odd, whistling _thud,_ a choked gasp—

 _No_ —

All the air around him seems to congeal as he turns— _just_ as shrouded figure wrenches their dagger out of Amaranth's back but far, _far_ too late to save her. Amaranth slides off the stool, already choking on her own blood, and the figure reaches up with a low chuckle and throws back her hood.

 _No, no—_

The Duchess of Spades peers down at him with disdain. "My, my. Tonight _is_ a good night for regicide, isn't it?" Amaranth coughs, her hands stirring feebly as she struggles to push herself up. The Duchess saunters past her, smiling to match the curved blade of her dagger. Morpheus stumbles backward, glancing at Milgranda's bed with newfound horror.

 _Not asleep. Not asleep at all…_

"Lucky me," the Duchess croons, "arriving here _seconds_ too late to save the Queen from a murderous little jester and his shriveled Abovegrounder puppet. Poor Milgranda. _So_ sad I couldn't save her, isn't it? But at least I could stop _you_ stealing the throne of Wonderland."

Through gritted teeth, sounding far braver than he feels, Morpheus snarls, "That 'Abovegrounder puppet' is the rightful Queen, you _fool!_ "

"Really? Amaranth—that old thing?" She turns, head cocked. " _Tch._ Doesn't look it. Well, no matter—"

Morpheus seizes her moment of distraction, lunging forward to grab for the dagger, but she roars in fury and throws her full weight against him, bearing him to the ground before he can wrest it from her grip—he wheezes as his lungs collapse—

Then he's pinned, her knee on his chest and her hand locked around his throat. She raises the dagger—

" _Morpheus._ "

It's a death rattle, horrible and wet and crackling, but Amaranth's voice rings with authority nonetheless. Morpheus can feel it singing through the air, and both he and the Duchess freeze. "Morpheus—as—your queen, I—" she chokes, and in the corner of his eyes Morpheus can see her spitting blood "—I… charge you to— _fix_ —what has—been… broken."

And all the power roiling in the air slams into him—a bolt of lightning to the heart, a slap of cold wind, a beam of sunlight piercing the clouds—flooding him with strength enough to shove the Duchess away.

She shrieks, and he _feels_ Amaranth die like the shock of darkness after a candle gutters out in its own wax. From outside comes the pounding of armored feet—Heart guards or Spade soldiers, and Morpheus isn't eager to face _either._

He rolls to his feet and makes a dive for the oval mirror above the vanity in the same instant as the bedchamber door bursts open.

Shouting, screaming, incomprehensible—Amaranth's dark eyes, staring and glazed in death, her blood on the carpet—the whistle of the Duchess's dagger whizzing past his ear—his own reflection, reaching out—

The mirror swallows him, and he's free.

* * *

Gasping, Alyssa falls back into herself and into the crushing grip of vertigo so intense that for an instant, she feels as if she's trapped in a cubist painting—stretched, distorted, taken apart and haphazardly reassembled. As the davenport tilts and spins beneath her, Alyssa is distantly aware of Morpheus sweeping her hair out of the way as she flops to the edge to be sick.

"It takes people like that sometimes," Morpheus says, apologetic. "Give a cough, luv. Best to get it all out at once."

Alyssa retches again, splattering the moth-eaten carpet with a nasty mixture of mucous and bile as the vertigo fades. Tears spill out of her eyes and drip off her chin, adding insult to injury.

"Th—" she gags, and a viscous gob of spittle leaks past her lips and plops wetly onto the floor. _Gross—gross! God,_ _throwing up is_ _disgusting_ —Alyssa shudders, and tries again. "That was— _urgh._ "

"I'll fetch some tea, shall I?" Morpheus says, as he guides her into a more comfortable position on the davenport. "Lie still. Don't move a muscle until I return."

 _Fat chance of that._ Her whole body feels like one big ache—she never wants to move _ever again._ She groans.

As Morpheus slips away, she closes her eyes and focuses on taking slow, even breaths to settle her stomach. Her nausea recedes little by little, and the memory Morpheus implanted in her mind rises to the fore instead. Alyssa prods at it, curious. It feels the same as any other memory, as real and vivid as if she lived it herself.

And already, the implications are creeping up on her. Queen Amaranth took Alice Liddell's place in England, and that means—

 _Alice_ isn't her ancestor after all. She's the great-great-great granddaughter of the Queen of Hearts…

That… changes things. Somehow. Or at least it fills her with the itchy, anxious feeling of having forgotten something important—Alyssa sighs, frustrated, and presses a hand over her eyes, tries to _think._

She _really_ hopes Morpheus isn't angling for some sort of put-the-long-lost-heir-on-the-throne solution. Galavanting around having adventures in Wonderland sounds nice on paper, but in practice it's mostly been a pain. _Literally_.

Nothing in Alison's notes had suggested—then again, Alyssa doesn't think Alison mentioned Queen Amaranth's impersonation of Alice at all, so…

Maybe—

Morpheus saunters back into the parlor, then, with a silver tea tray balanced on one arm and a damp rag draped over the other, putting an end to her speculation. "Feeling better, luv?"

"Much," Alyssa says, "and also much more curious. Your answers have a way of asking more questions."

"All the best answers do," Morpheus says with a wink. He sets the tray on the little end table next to the davenport, pours her a cup, and then kneels to mop up the spilled contents of her stomach. "Drink up and ask away."

Though she's never been all that fond of tea, she takes a few careful sips of his; it's warm and sweet in a muted, apple-y sort of way. Not bad, actually. "So," she says, "Amaranth is my ancestor, not Alice."

"Correct."

"Did… Mom know?"

He shakes his head. "Being descended from Alice meant a great deal to her," he replies. "She lost her mother very young, and then bounced from one foster home to the next—Alice in Wonderland gave her a lineage to cling to, a permanent identity, a feeling of _home…_ Learning the truth might have shattered that security, and I thought it kinder not to tell."

Thinking of the battered copy of _"Alison's" Adventures in Wonderland,_ she nods slowly. "Okay. Makes sense. So. In her notes, she said the reason you needed _us_ to save Wonderland was our connection to Alice, because the taint started with her. That can't be right, so what's the truth?"

Morpheus takes his time answering, first setting the dirtied rag aside and pouring himself a cup of tea, then perching beside her on the davenport to drink it, eyeing her over its rim. She shifts, feeling nervous, feeling _studied._

"You're going to help me bring Queen Amaranth back to life," he says at last.

Alyssa chokes on her tea. "I—what?"

"Aye." Humor colors his voice. "No need to look so shocked, luv. Death is as fickle as anything else in Wonderland, and can be persuaded to relinquish its charges from time to time. The real challenge is in collecting the ingredients, most of which are quite rare, and finding a direct descendent with the proper temperament."

"Proper—?"

"One with a harmonious spirit," Morpheus says. "That's you, luv."

Frowning, Alyssa says, "Not sure how I feel about having a 'harmonious spirit' with the _Queen of Hearts_."

He chuckles. "Oh, she wasn't as bad as all that, luv. Remember your lessons? Ferocious, and wild—"

"—wrathful and loving in equal measure," Alyssa recites, closing her eyes. Morpheus must have drilled this into her head over and over; the words form themselves so clearly in her mind that she can almost _see_ them. She shakes her head, and they dissipate. "Sure, but I'm not about to go around chopping off heads—"

"Nevertheless," Morpheus says, rather snippily, "you're like enough for our purposes. _Harmonious_ does not mean _identical."_

"Fine," she mutters, crossing her arms. "So I'm the alto to her soprano, whatever. How's this ritual work, anyway?"

"The idea is to fashion an effigy for the dead spirit to inhabit; then the descendent—you—becomes the gateway through which the ancestor can pass."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Not the ritual itself. You would lose a few drops of blood, and the actual moment of crossing is said to be a little uncomfortable… Nothing more. However, two of the ingredients will be _exceptionally_ dangerous to acquire. One is the jarful of Nothing, which must be collected in the Dark Country." He lifts an eyebrow. "You recall, I'm sure."

Alyssa can't suppress a shudder. "That… _nothing…_ we passed through to get here?"

"The very same," Morpheus says. "You'll have to find your own way there to collect a sample."

"Couldn't you get it for me? I mean—" She flushes. It feels such like a lazy, cowardly thing to ask. "—since you already…"

"It must be you," Morpheus replies gently. "To enter the Dark Country, one must first learn the character of their own soul and— _unfold_ it. Each has their own way; you will find yours, and only once you've done so will you be prepared to carry Amaranth's spirit out of death and into new life _without_ losing yourself in the process. It's rather like learning to walk through a mirror without risking a chiral."

"Oh." That sounds complicated, and a bit mystical, and for the moment all Alyssa can do is shake her head. She'll have to figure it out later. "And the other dangerous ingredient?"

"The needle threaded with starlight. Any needle will do, but the thread is woven from fur belonging to Inkaskre—the Hare in the Night Sky. Only one skein of it exists in all Wonderland, and the Hatter owns it."

Alyssa's heart sinks. _Of course she does._ "So we have to steal it."

He smiles ruefully. "Easier said than done, luv, but aye. She keeps it in her citadel beyond the Looking Glass, and the only way to get _there_ is by invitation. Which is why you're headed to the Tea Party tomorrow."

She blinks. After everything he's told her about the Hatter—he can't be serious. "Isn't that kind of, I don't know, _suicidal?_ She sent an _army_ after Taelor and me today!"

" _Suicidal_ would be attempting to infiltrate her citadel," Morpheus says, shaking his head. "I've sent dozens of Wonderland's best thieves after the skein, Alyssa. Not one has ever returned, and only _one_ even made it to her citadel's _outer wall._ "

"And you think marching right up to her on her home turf is gonna go any better?"

"Mad as it sounds," he says dryly, " _yes._ The Hatter likes to toy with her prey. Approach her on her terms, play her games, and she _might_ agree to show you around her citadel. The better to trap and torment you, you understand."

 _Well that's just_ peachy.

Scowling, Alyssa says, "I'll think about it."

"That's all I ask," Morpheus says.

No longer in the mood for questions with horrible answers, Alyssa lapses into a silence Morpheus seems content to leave intact and sips broodingly at her tea.

 _At least the water from the Pool of Tears was straightforward,_ she thinks. _A dying ember pulled from the heart of a flame_ —well, that should be simple, too. As for the last four… _A thunderstorm captured in a stone, a feather that has touched the edge of the sky, a shard of cold-iron soaked in blood, a twist of Time preserved in silver…_

Those are just riddles, right?

Alyssa can _do_ riddles.

She takes a deep breath. _Get the hardest part done first, and the rest will follow._ That's how she tackles her art—wrestling her concepts onto scrap paper with pencil and well-worn eraser until she's satisfied with the composition, _then_ starting the fun mosaic part—and it's always worked out fine.

Then again, she doesn't have to worry about her sketches beheading her if she screws up.

 _No pressure._

Trying very hard to ignore the mental image of her bloody severed head rolling across the floor, she raises her teacup to her lips and drinks, trying to extract some courage from the warm, sweet liquid. "What I don't get," she says, "is how resurrecting Amaranth will heal Wonderland."

"She was the last _true_ Queen of Wonderland," Morpheus says wistfully. "Anyone can put on a crown and call themself a queen, you see, but it doesn't make them _the_ _Queen._ Wonderland—" He closes his eyes, lips parting around a rapturous sigh. "This land is _alive,_ luv, though it lives on a scale so great as to be unfathomable to we mortals. The marker of a _true_ Queen is that she _can_ fathom it, for Wonderland shows her the way. In a sense, she _becomes_ Wonderland, and forever after she speaks with the voice and will of Wonderland itself. Her word, in a very literal sense, becomes _law."_

"Like children not being allowed to die here."

"Precisely."

Alyssa considers this. "And that's why you're still alive? Amaranth ordered you to fix everything—"

"—so Wonderland intervened to ensure that I _could,_ aye. Haven't aged a day since."

"Lucky you," Alyssa mutters. "So, a true Queen—Amaranth—could just… order Wonderland to get better? And it would? Just like that?"

"Just like that," Morpheus agrees. "Marvelous, isn't it? Alas, because King Finvarra obscured his wife's will and placed a pretender on the throne instead of her chosen heir, we've not had a true Queen in over a century. Wonderland has rejected each and every claimant since Amaranth's death."

She drains the last of her tea and sets the teacup back on the tray. "Okay. So. Let's say I agree to your insane plan and go to the Tea Party tomorrow so we can get to the thread…"

"Yes?"

"What's the other stuff?"

"Well, you've the stone and the water already," Morpheus says.

"No?"

"…No?"

Alyssa frowns at him. "Just the water. I don't even know what the thunderstorm in a stone is supposed to _be._ "

His face darkens at once. With a low growl, he leaps to his feet and paces the length of the parlor, then whirls on her. "There was a fulgurite inside the Rabbit Hole. Forgive me for assuming you would have the brains to _take it._ "

She shrinks from the venom in his tone. "A—a _what?_ "

"Fulg—" He makes a cutting gesture with one hand, his rage vanishing as swiftly as it appeared. "The rock that forms when lightning strikes sand. No matter, no matter. I'll send the Gryphon to collect it and there'll be no harm done."

The smile he offers her looks a little forced. Alyssa swallows. "Sorry."

"…You were in rather a lot of pain at the time," Morpheus mutters, rifling a hand through his hair. "I suppose allowances must be made." He sighs. "Well, you've the water, I've the feather, and we'll shortly have the stone. The dying ember is no riddle at all, only a matter of timing; we needn't worry about it until the end. You can search for the cold-iron when you return from the Tea Party—look for iron in the shallows of the Claret River. It flows from Argine, and it's run red with blood often enough in the last two centuries to count."

"And the… twist of Time?"

" _That,_ I believe, refers to the White Rabbit's watch. Or one like it, if others exist." Morpheus resumes his seat on the davenport. "It commands Time, and he guards it _zealously._ All my efforts to persuade him to loan it to me have failed, so in the end it may come to wrestling it away from him. Unless you find him more amenable to your requests than mine."

Alyssa nods, and keeps nodding until she feels like a bobble-head and forces herself to stop. _It's a lot. It's a lot. But…_

If she can survive the Tea Party, the rest should be easy.

She sighs gustily. "Okay," she says. "Okay. I'm in."

And, as Morpheus's face glows with triumph, she feels a tiny, irrational, _ridiculous_ thrill of excitement.


	12. the hat must go on

**TWELVE.** _THE HAT MUST GO ON._

Another dream:

Of a turbulent, chattering darkness hurling her to and fro. Just a scrap of flotsam on the endless black sea; beyond fear, beyond pain, beyond anything but gauzy awareness of the dark and a slow dissolution of herself into the starless night…

Alyssa jolts into a disorientation of sunlight.

For an instant, the shadows of her dreams twine together with the bright morning in a dizzy kaleidoscope of velvet black and misty gold; then sunlight washes the darkness away and leaves her curiously breathless. It pours through the rambling lattice of the treetops and floods the parlor with a enchanted glow so thick she can almost taste it.

"Morpheus…?"

They had wiled the night away in hushed conversation, he perched at the foot of the davenport and telling her more of the Hatter, her Tea Party, and the impenetrable citadel from which she directed her plans; only when the dark sky began to pale to lavender daybreak did he slip away and leave her to her sleep.

Now, as she props herself on an elbow and surveys the parlor—a more threadbare and moth-eaten place by day than it had seemed in the bruised dusk and silvered moonlight—she finds herself quite alone.

Wincing, Alyssa pushes herself fully upright; her knee throbs, and the burns along her arm pulse in angry protest, but the pain is tempered by the glowing embers of confidence Morpheus's council lit in her chest last night. As if sparks of his absolute faith in her had leapt away and found fresh kindling in the caverns of her heart.

She stretches carefully, and hears the crinkling of paper.

A moment's investigation turns up a folded note, folded with tidy precision but crumpled a bit by her having sat on it. Her name carves across the crisp white sheet in elegant blue script, and she unfolds it with interest.

 _Luv,_

 _You shan't see me 'til you return from the Tea Party, for I'll spend the morning in Westport; there's the fulgurite to collect and other errands to be done, all of such import I trust none but myself to handle them. For one thing, the Hatter learnt of your presence here too swiftly for mere coincidence, and I intend to discover how._

 _Your friend, likewise, should come to Rethen House in the early afternoon, for it's a long and winding walk and precious few in Wonderland can leap the Dark Country as I can. Rest assured she is in safe hands, and put her out of your mind until your task is complete._

 _Wear the dress I have left for you. The Hatter will understand its message._

 _Be cautious, be courageous, and let us regale each other with tales of our successes when we reunite this evening._

 _Fair faryn, Alyssa._

 _Morpheus._

* * *

Alyssa hears the Tea Party before she sees it.

A thunderous clattering of china and cutlery gambols among the trees. Once or twice she feels it brushing against her arms, the invisible burrs of a cup clinking against its saucer or a knife scraping over burnt toast snagging on the delicate fabric of her mismatched blue gloves, the tides of indecipherable chatter rising and falling in her ears like waves crashing upon the shore.

Her own movement seems silent by comparison, the silky whispers of her iridescent blue skirts muffled, the crunch of leaves underfoot distorted and distant.

And then there's the _voice._ It soars above the general clamor, bright and hard as a diamond: "Come, come, stop _trembling!_ We've better things to do than persecuting rabbits who cannot follow simple instructions, do we not? Sit down. Have some more tea. _Sit down,_ I said!"

A graceless _thump_ and scattered laughter follows that remark. Alyssa peers around the gnarled trunk of an oak tree and finds that she's arrived; beyond the tree lies a little clearing, and in the center of that is the Tea Party.

It isn't the imposing, gilded banquet she imagined—just a long table groaning beneath an excess of tea things. An assortment of perhaps a dozen people sit around it, dressed in colorful rags and artful patchworks of which the dominant color is red; here and there are flashes of dyed hair, vivid tattoos, elaborate hats.

Short, dry grass surrounds the table, littered with the shards of shattered teacups, and a single barren oak tree—massive, twisted, and utterly dead—rises in a painful spiral above the table.

The only truly remarkable thing is the woman standing atop the table.

 _The Hatter._

She's—

Alyssa isn't sure anymore what she expected—only not _this._ The Hatter is tall and slender, stunningly beautiful, but… _wrong._ Like an ancient Greek statue come awkwardly to life; she's all sculpted lips and carved cheekbones, skin as pale and smooth and _lifeless_ as marble.

All but her eyes. They're a vicious, violent blue, and alive with glittering malice.

Most of her mahogany-red hair is swept under a top hat the color of welling blood, leaving only a handful of curls to frame her face. A double-breasted tweed waistcoat with tails and a high collar hugs her torso, and fitted jodhpurs emphasize the considerable length of her legs. Her muscular arms are bare, though she wears fingerless leather gloves, and a thick black line of ink sprouts from her right wrist and snakes up the rest of her arm, bristling all over with leaflike clusters of green diamonds; the effect is of a crawling vine.

Presently she leans on a bone-white cane and looms over the White Rabbit, who cowers before her as he stutters something too quiet for Alyssa's ears.

The Hatter laughs—a joyless sound, harsh and mocking—and unease prickles down Alyssa's skin. "Oh, yes, to be sure, but I've more important rabbits to chase today than the likes of _you_. After all…" She spins to address the whole table, her arms flung wide, the long tails of her waistcoat snapping behind her to whip the White Rabbit across the face. "Today is a very… _special_ day." Her brilliant eyes gleam with mirth when she glances back over her shoulder. "So you're off the hook. How fortunate for you."

He makes a sound halfway between whimper and moan, and Alyssa shrinks behind her tree. All the embers of courage and confidence Morpheus inspired in her burn to ash and scatter before the unfiltered _cruelty_ in the Hatter's eyes, and the ravenous expressions worn by the other guests. Her mouth runs dry.

"Less fortunate for others," the Hatter adds, and some of the guests exchange smirks. "Yes. Today is— _special._ For today, at last, after _all_ these years, we welcome that latest of all latecomers— _Alice._ "

And she whirls like a striking viper, her cane slamming into the tabletop with a resounding _crack._ Alyssa follows the line of her gaze, and all the breath vacates her lungs in an instant.

It's _Alice._

Alice Stetson—frozen in the shade of the trees across the way, looking as shocked by the Hatter's pronouncement as Alyssa is—

 _What the_ hell _is she doing here?_

There's a man beside her, a little taller than she is, his ruddy black skin blending him more into the shadows, dressed in a T-shirt and faded old jeans that mark him as another outsider in Wonderland.

 _So much for the Rabbit Hole only letting in one person at a time._

Agonizing silence follows. The atmosphere sharpens with an evil anticipation—though for _what,_ Alyssa can't fathom.

Alice breaks it first. "Have… we met before?"

"In your dreams," the Hatter breathes, and then raps her cane once more against the tabletop and cries, "Time for a clean cup! Everyone change seats!—And make way for our new guests. And you—" Alyssa flinches as the Hatter's cane flicks up to point squarely at her. "Stop lurking in the bushes. Come and have some _tea._ "

Tea, the way she says it, sounds like a euphemism for _poison._ Swallowing her reluctance, Alyssa emerges from the meager protection of the trees and inches toward the table.

"Oh!" The Hatter laughs again, this time full of a childish glee far worse than the mocking farce from before. "And Morris! Bring out the other fellow, won't you?"

Morris turns out to be a fat little man with beady amber eyes, a patchy brown complexion, and a grin like a filleting knife. His pinstriped coat unfurls like a flag behind him as he vaults out of his chair and dives forward with the now-familiar twisting motion; he transforms into a large hare before he hits the ground, and races away in a frenetic zig-zag to fetch whoever the _other fellow_ is.

Alyssa is positive she doesn't want to know.

"Now," the Hatter says crisply. Another guest leaps out of her way, and she descends from table to chair and then to the dry grass without ever breaking her gaze from Alice, who has drawn level with the table by now. "Alice, _Alice._ My dear, bewildered, awfully _late_ Alice. Whatever are we to do with you, hmm? You don't look a thing like yourself."

She shoulders Alice's companion aside and circles Alice, so close that Alyssa feels claustrophobic just _watching._ Alice hikes her shoulders up to her chin, and the Hatter _tsk_ s. "No, not what I expected at _all._ "

"…Yes, well," Alice mutters, "that makes two of us."

The Hatter gives a tinkling, humorless giggle, but before she can get another word out, Alice's companion inserts himself between them again and says, in a low, concerned voice, "Sir _Corogarde?"_

He may as well have slapped her: she recoils, her shoulders rising, her lips parting around a startled hiss.

Her surprise lasts only for a second. Then recognition lights her eyes and she laughs again. " _Jack?_ By the King, sir, I thought you burnt to ashes in Tumtum with the rest. Fancy finding you alive after _all_ these years! And with _Alice,_ no less. Moving up in the world, mm?"

"…What happened to you?" he whispers, in the same instant Alice says, "Jack—you know her?"

"Not anymore," the Hatter says. "Obviously. I've not been Sir Corogarde in years—the chess people are all dead or gone, by the way, Jack. If you hadn't heard." His face falls, which seems to amuse her. "But he did _once,_ Alice, yes. Oh, I could tell you _such_ stories! …But dear, dear, didn't he think to warn you?"

Her head cocks to one side, birdlike, as her voice ripens with implication, and Alice frowns. "I trust Jack."

" _Do_ you?" The Hatter plants one hand in the center of Jack's chest and shoves him out of her way, stepping closer to Alice and leaning in until her lips brush the shell of Alice's ear. Her voice a venomous purr, she murmurs, "Is that why you've not told him about that nice little studio in Queens?"

All the color evaporates from Alice's face. "It isn't like that!"

"… _What_ studio?"

"Not like _what?_ " The Hatter bares her teeth in something too feral to be called a grin. "Not like _what,_ Alice? Not like—oh, _oh,_ of _course_ it won't end in divorce, but you can't deny you're searching for that exit ramp. Not like you're suffocating. Not like you _just_ can't take the pressure—"

"Shut _up!_ "

Alice shudders, cringing as if the words were torn out of her, and the Hatter rocks back on her heels, running her tongue along her lips and half-closing her eyes as she savors Alice's distress. Alyssa edges away, taken aback by the display, the petty playground cruelty played out incongruously on an adult stage—her stomach churns, but she swallows hard and reminds herself that anxiety won't stop the Hatter's sick games.

"…Alice," Jack whispers. He makes a halting motion, almost reaching for her but stopping himself with a little twitch.

A strangled gasp escapes Alice's lips. Trembling, she rakes her fingers through her curls and draws herself straight, shakes her head. "Don't. D— _please_ don't. Not… now."

"Yes, yes, you can fight it out later," the Hatter says blithely. "Now, it's time for _tea._ "

Her hand clamps viselike around Alice's forearm. Evading Jack's attempt to stop her with ease, she hurls Alice into an empty seat; Jack hurries to sit beside her, glaring daggers the Hatter ignores as she turns her malevolent blue gaze on Alyssa.

As their eyes lock, paralyzing terror floods Alyssa's mind. She's a mouse caught between a tiger's paws— _worse,_ even, for tigers kill for hunger while the Hatter looks eager to hurt her purely for the joy of it.

"And here's our gatecrasher," the Hatter says, soft as the breeze—though with the way the guests hang on her every word, Alyssa is positive nobody misses it. "One seeking a boon, if I'm not mistaken. Come." Her mouth curves into a radiant smile, one Alyssa could easily have thought kind if she hadn't already seen the truth of the Hatter's nature. "Sit. Morris will be returning directly with— _ah!_ Here she is. Put him on the table, darling, please."

Alyssa turns, startled. A massive, high-backed, bile-yellow chesterfield armchair advances toward them on pinstriped legs—it takes her a moment to make sense of the sight and work out that the legs belong to Morris, and only then can she focus on the absurdity of the chair's occupant.

Perched precariously in the chair is a spindly man carved of solid ice.

The sculpture is exquisite; every seam, every button, every crease of his fine, old-fashioned suit is rendered in perfect detail. One of his hands holds a teacup aloft, with a frozen wave of tea slopping out the side; the other rests on his knee, clutching a large pocket watch on a chain whose every individual link has been meticulously whittled out of ice.

The only thing left unfinished is his head: a smooth, blank oval with, for reasons Alyssa doesn't want to contemplate, some sort of cage embedded in the top half.

Grunting, Morris slams the chair down on the end of the table, rattling the dishes and making the sculpture teeter ominously for a moment.

"Thank you," the Hatter murmurs, and swoops over to kiss his cheek and flirt her fingers over his ratty grey cravat while he beams adoringly up at her. It's so sickeningly sweet that Alyssa can't help thinking it must be fake, too, no different than the Hatter's weaponized laughter and honeyed-poison smiles.

She smooths the front of her dress, hoping to settle her discomfort but managing only to accentuate it by reminding herself of its stark contrast with the rest of the Tea Party. Against this background of warm browns and vivid reds, the opulent blue Morpheus dressed her in stands out like a sore thumb.

"Recognize him?"

The Hatter's voice punctures her reverie. Alyssa jumps, and follows the Hatter's nod to the strange, faceless statue in the chair.

"…No?"

"Then it seems a history lesson is in order," the Hatter says, unperturbed. "Sit, my dear, sit." She gestures to a vacant armchair at the head of the table, opposite the statue. "You may take mine for now. _I_ shan't be needing it."

Her tone brooks no argument, and Morris—who leans against her side as if glued there—fixes Alyssa with a hostile glare that promises suffering if she disobeys. Alyssa steels her nerves and limps to sit, gingerly, in the Hatter's chair.

Its cushions conform perfectly to her body as she sinks into it, which just seems _wrong,_ considering how uncomfortable the rest of the Tea Party has been.

"Good girl." The Hatter takes Morris's hand and allows him to help her back onto the table, swatting teacups out of her way with her cane as she goes. "Now. Some two hundred years ago, there lived a man named Herman Hattington who suffered a magnificent malady that robbed him of his face but allowed him to mimic any other he came across, a hated affliction in his childhood but an invaluable boon in adulthood, for no hand-crafted device could measure up to the measurements he took with his own malleable skull. Blessed as he was with hands of unparalleled deftness and an uncommon eye for artistry, he soon became known—without question, without contest—as the very _finest_ hatter in all Wonderland.

"So exceptional was his skill, and so unrivaled was he by any competitor, that he became known as _the_ Hatter: the only one worth knowing." She prowls the table as she speaks, each step in perfect rhythm with the flow of her voice. The effect is hypnotic; Alyssa has to fight to keep from leaning in.

"Years passed, and his renown spread throughout all the lands. Travelers came to commission him from all corners of Wonderland, from the mist-shrouded wilds and uncharted territories, from the Land Beyond the Looking Glass, from Rilchiam Isle and even more distant places." Her voice sinks, becoming silky as her gaze sweeps over the table. "From the Dark Country itself, some say, though none dare speculate on what creatures might live in the abyss."

A collective shiver runs through the crowd. Alyssa shares it.

"And, at last, Time himself sought Hattington out, and asked for a hat deserving of both the Hatter's renown and his own limitless power.

"Hattington tried to decline. Such a had would demand an eternity to craft; how could he, mere mortal that he was, accomplish such a feat? But Time presented him with a magnificent silver watch and told him, 'Make me a hat, and I'll be your friend; and for my friend, I'll do almost anything you like with the clock. Only whisper a hint to the face of this watch and I will make it so.' Awed and honored, Hattington accepted." The Hatter pauses, her thumb drumming against the bulbous handle of her cane. She throws a piercing glance Alyssa's way. "'A twist of Time preserved in silver'—that _is_ something you need, isn't it?"

Alyssa's heart thumps hard against her ribs. _The White Rabbit's watch isn't the only one! And—is she offering to_ help _me?!_

"Yes," she whispers.

A genuine smile touches the Hatter's lips. The change it makes is startling; she looks almost human. "Yes," she breathes. "I thought so."

Then the smile falls away, and she slips back into her tale as if there had been no interruption at all. "Hattington took the watch and with it, stretched a single evening into centuries. The watch kept him young and tireless as he worked and worked—felted and dyed and sewed until his hands bled from innumerable needle-pricks and mercurial fumes clouded his vision. At last, he produced a hat he thought worthy of Time, and he carried it proudly into the long-awaited dawn.

"Time was well pleased with his effort, and bade Hattington to keep the watch thereafter. He warned him to keep it safe, to never give it up, to use it wisely, and to never waste the time he'd been given, for Time would not tolerate frivolous abuses of his power. Alas, this final warning went unheeded." Her circuit of the table carries her past Hattington, and she trails her fingertips down the curve of his featureless head.

"Hattington couldn't resist the urge to boast of his watch's power, and boasting led to demands of proof which his honor—or perhaps his ego—demanded he answer. He made a show of toying with Time during a concert given by Queen Amaranth the Lost, and Time, enraged by his mistreatment at the hands of one he counted a dear and trusted friend, swore Hattington would see not another _tick_ nor _tock_ so long as Time existed.

"This everlasting ice burst forth from Time's lips and locked Hattington forever in his moment of hubris. He's been frozen ever since—and his precious watch with him." She lifts an eyebrow suggestively.

"Are you saying you want me to… unfreeze him, somehow?"

"I am indeed!" the Hatter cries, beaming down the length of the table. "And in return, you'll have the watch. I've no need for it, and no doubt Hattington has learnt his lesson by now. Legend has it he's still alive in there, awake and aware beneath the ice." She raps a knuckle against his shoulder and grins.

"But… I thought…"

"Yes?"

"You're with the _Queen,_ " Alyssa says. "And she doesn't want—"

"Oh, _her,_ " the Hatter says, flicking her hand like she's swatting away an irksome fly. "She wants whatever I tell her to want. I'm on nobody's side but my own, Alyssa."

"Is _that_ why you sent soldiers after us yesterday?"

The Hatter offers her another pleasant smile. "Needs must. I _do_ have a reputation to maintain. Besides, you escaped."

"Barely!"

"Nevertheless." She kicks a teapot out of the way and into the waiting arms of a guest as she strides to Alyssa's end of the table. "It's true I've no interest in Morpheus's little… project. But I do have reason to want Hattington freed from this curse. He is, after all, the father of my craft."

She stops at the very edge of the table, peering down at Alyssa with half-closed eyes.

She isn't as flawless as she appeared from a distance.

The redness of her mouth isn't from lipstick, as Alyssa had thought, but from irritation—they're splitting and inflamed, stained a variegated red and black by fresh blood and flaking scabs. Pale, ropey scars slash across her arms, one snaking under her waistcoat and protruding past the collar to reach the hollow of her throat.

She extends a hand wracked by jittery tremors, and the swollen tips of her fingers are covered in deep, bloody fissures ashy scales of dead skin.

She looks ill. She looks halfway _dead,_ waxy and bleeding and cracked.

Except for those bright, bright eyes…

Alyssa bites her lip.

"What do you say, Alyssa? Shall we call a truce?"

This turn of events doesn't—it _must_ be some sort of trick, except Alyssa can't see what the Hatter could gain from unfreezing Hattington and aiding a plot Morpheus claimed would strip her of her power.

Unless she plans to steal the watch for herself?

Or maybe what she's saying now is true, and the enmity between her and Morpheus is more a matter of her being loathsome and he a gentleman than her lust for power, and she really is indifferent to his goal—or at least imagines she can turn his success to her advantage.

Hesitant, Alyssa says, "You really think I can free him? I wouldn't know where to start."

"If you're the savior Morpheus believes in? Yes. Certainly." The Hatter quirks an eyebrow expectantly. "Come, examine him. You may find it's less of a puzzle than you think."

 _The Hatter likes to toy with her prey. Approach her on her terms, play her games, and she might agree to show you around her citadel…_

It has to be a trick.

But Morpheus did tell her to play along…

Sighing, Alyssa braces the foot of her good leg against the tabletop and accepts the Hatter's hand—shuddering at the touch of her fingertips, icy even through the silk of Alyssa's gloves—and allows herself to be hauled out of her chair and then led through the ankle-height maze of the table settings.

The stares of the other guests burn into her. Alyssa can feel their eyes picking her apart—studying the loose-fitting silk dress, patterned and draped to resemble the fragile wings of a butterfly—the untamed fall of her hair—the bandages on her knee and fading burns peeking out from under her gloves.

She can practically hear the conclusions turning in their minds. _Weak. Frail. Delicate. Naive. Just a foolish little girl playing games she cannot understand…_

The tension in the air draws tight as a bowstring. Razor wire around her throat. Alyssa clenches her hands into fists and marches on, her gaze fixed on Hattington.

Halfway down the table, the Hatter saunters ahead to lean her hip against Hattington's chair, her eyes even colder than her fingertips as she stares Alyssa down.

 _It's a trick. I know it's a trick and that means she can't trick me. Not really. I'll survive whatever she throws at me._

She's within an arm's length of Hattington when the Hatter puts her hand against his chair and shoves; in the same instant, Morris—whose presence at the foot of the table Alyssa had completely forgotten—grabs the base of the chair and heaves the whole thing over his head, so it goes flying end-over-end off the table.

The frozen statue that was once Herman Hattington hits the ground and shatters with a phenomenal _CRASH._

Jagged shards explode away from the impact—chunks of bone bristling with frost, a translucent lump of icy intestines, a pair of curled fingers splintered at the base.

Only the watch remains intact. Alyssa, rooted to the spot, sees a layer of ice melt away from a shimmering clock face and _feels_ the power billowing up like steam—and then Morris's heel stomps down on top of it.

There's a _crunch,_ and the feeling of power snaps and bleeds away.

" _Oops,_ " the Hatter croons in her ear. Alyssa sways dizzily. Through the fog of shock, she hears the Hatter add, "Ah, well. No use crying over spilled tea, is there?"

Somebody laughs behind her.

"You killed him," Alyssa whispers.

The Hatter pounds her cane on the table and roars, "Let's play the Game!" to whoops of approval from her guests. It all sounds fuzzy to Alyssa, crackling with static like a badly-tuned radio.

Alice's voice, shaking with outrage, slices through the ringing in her ears. "You just killed a man and you want to play a _game?!_ "

" _The_ Game, Alice, _the_ Game. The only game worth playing."

Alyssa finally forces herself to look away from what's left of Hattington, turning in a blur to see Hatter kneeling in front of Alice, shoving her back into her seat; Alice has to clutch at the table to keep her chair from toppling backwards.

"He's been frozen a hundred and sixty-four years, Alice. _If_ he still lived, killing him was a mercy. Now _hush,_ so Morris can explain the rules."

There's a low _boom_ that shakes the dishes, which turns out to be from Morris heaving Hattington's chair onto the table again. Morris hops up himself, flashes a wicked grin at Alyssa, and then bounds past her to catch the Hatter's outstretched hand. She caresses his chin with a fleeting smile as he pulls her to her feet; a flickering look whose meaning Alyssa can't even guess at passes between them, and Morris darts past her, skipping nimbly around the tea things as he heads up the table.

"You're the subject for today, Alyssa," the Hatter says, in a playful trill that turns Alyssa's stomach.

"What…?"

"Sit— _there._ " She gestures with her cane to Hattington's chair. "In the place of honor—because you're the guest—"

"—and you're the _Game_ ," Morris crows. Another guest—a woman with ginger curls and protuberant brown eyes too large for her thin face—whips off her battered black top hat and tosses it to him. Morris catches it deftly and spins it between his fingers.

"I don't want—" Alyssa begins, but it's no use. The Hatter grabs her shoulder and throws her bodily into the chair, which rocks with the force of her impact.

A vision of it tumbling through the air again swims into Alyssa's imagination—only this time, it's _her_ flying out of it and cracking her skull on the dry lawn.

Velvet crumples under her fingers as she scrabbles at the armrests, trying to escape—but the Hatter drapes herself over the back, seizes a fistful of Alyssa's hair, and yanks her back with an implacable strength against which Alyssa's skateboarding muscle might as well not exist.

"The Game is simple," Morris says, spinning the hat once more. His voice falls into a ritual cadence as he draws a deck of playing cards out of his coat and continues, "Everyone writes on a card the thing that bothers them _most_ about Alyssa."

 _…What?!_

With a grandiose flick of his wrist, he tosses the cards into the air; the guests surge to catch them like cats leaping after falling leaves. "And then we put the cards into the hat, and then we take the cards out one by one and read them all aloud! First to draw tears wins!"

" _ENOUGH!_ "

Alice slams both palms into the table as she surges to her feet. The slap of flesh against wood seems to echo in the abrupt, startled silence that follows. A handful of unclaimed cards drift and settle onto the tabletop, and Alice glares around with such incandescent fury that Alyssa feels a bizarre urge to apologize. " _Enough!_ That isn't a _game!_ Games are supposed to be _fun,_ Hatter, not a bunch of adults who should know better ganging up on a _child._ What the _hell's_ the matter with you?!"

Gratitude swells in Alyssa's chest, a strange counterpoint to the anxious hammering of blood in her ears.

"What's the matter with me? What's the matter with _you,_ Alice?" The Hatter laughs like she's made some terribly clever joke and releases Alyssa's hair, stalking toward Alice instead with the tails of her waistcoat flapping in her wake. "You're moody, reckless, irritable—belligerent!—unkind and uncharitable—distracted… _disconnected_ —oh! Thoughtless, senseless, _selfish!_ "

She lashes out and catches Alice's jaw, forcing her head up. "You've worked so _hard_ to be better than you are and still you're just the woman you've always been. _Tragic,_ isn't it?"

Alice wrenches herself out of Hatter's grip and collapses back into her chair while Jack rises, leaning to put himself between her and the Hatter. "If you can't say anything nice—!" His voice drops to a furious hiss. "Is this your idea of keeping the Red Queen's memory, Madara? Forgetting all the _manners_ —"

 _CRACK._

The blow catches Jack across the jaw and sends him reeling; the Hatter stands so absolutely still in its wake that it takes Alyssa longer than it should to realize that she's the one who hit him.

Her stillness infects the rest of the table, transforming it into a tableau of shocked, wide-eyed stares. Nobody moves except Jack, who rubs his jaw like he can't quite believe what just happened, and Alice, who gets up and hurries to his side, her face pale.

"Do not," the Hatter whispers at last, "call me that. And you don't know. You weren't _there._ Off gallivanting Up There while the rest of us— You _weren't there,_ Jack. Henrietta!"

The name flies from her lips like a whipcrack, and everybody jumps; the woman whose hat Morris borrowed drops her teacup with a clatter, her too-large eyes growing even larger. "Yes?"

"Escort these—interlopers— _out._ "

" _Gladly._ "

Henrietta flows out of her chair and vaults over the table with such fluid grace she hardly seems to move at all, and Alice turns from fussing over Jack to glare determinedly up at the Hatter. "Alyssa's leaving with us."

"You _would_ think that, wouldn't you?" Henrietta says. Her voice is startling—too rich and throaty to belong to someone so skinny. She plucks at Alice's elbow with bony fingers. "Only she won't, you see. She _can't_ leave yet, as you'd know if you asked for things instead of demanded them. You oughtn't be so presumptuous—and rude—I _know_ you're an Abovegrounder and can't help it, but even so—"

"Henrietta," the Hatter says, quieter this time.

Henrietta tosses her hair with a loud sniff and cocks her head in Alyssa's direction. Though her head is about level with Alyssa's knees, she manage to give the impression of staring imperiously _down_ at her. " _Well?_ Do you really want to leave just as things are getting _fun?_ "

 _Yes, actually,_ Alyssa thinks, but the instructions Morpheus gave her last night rise to answer the thought. _The Hatter admires courage and abhors weakness. She will do more than test you—she will try to_ break _you, and you mustn't allow her to do so. Hold fast, stand your ground, and do_ not _leave the Tea Party until you've secured an invitation. She does not give second chances._

She bites her lip, torn.

 _I might end up like Hattington…_

"Alyssa," Alice says, very gently, "you don't have to stay. You don't need to prove anything. There's _nothing_ to be gained from letting people treat you badly."

"…I can't," Alyssa whispers, looking away so she doesn't have to see the compassion and fear in Alice's eyes. "It isn't about me."

"The nobility of the young is so charming," Henrietta says, with syrupy cheer. "Now come along! It isn't nice to overstay your welcome!"

She takes Alice's arm again and tugs, and Alice trails after her, glancing over her shoulder at Alyssa with concern written all over her face. Jack follows them, hovering protectively close to Alice's side and never looking back.

The Hatter stares after them as she descends from the table, her shoulders quaking, her breath shallow and shuddery like the aftermath of tears.

No one speaks until they've vanished into the trees.

Then the Hatter lifts her head and says, in a steady, dull voice, "Morris?"

"Hatter."

"Carry on."

Morris flips Henrietta's hat over in his hands, glares around at the other guests, and snaps, "What're you waiting for? _Write!_ "

The guests burst into action, scrambling to pick up cards that had lain forgotten on the table, scribbling madly and tossing pens back and forth, now and then jeering when someone misses a catch or smirking nastily as they peek at Alyssa. She catches the White Rabbit shooting her apologetic glances as he scrawls something on a card; it gives her an odd pang of betrayal. Morris prowls the table, collecting cards into the hat and kicking dishes out of his way.

Anxiety ties Alyssa's stomach into knots; she tries to count the cards, but there's too many—some of the guests keep asking for more—and the thought of what they must _say_ makes her feel even worse.

So she watches the Hatter instead.

Watches her smooth the front of her waistcoat and straighten her posture, watches her lick her lips and tap her fingers against her cane again and again until there's blood oozing down the pale handle, watches her shake herself and drag her gaze away from the shadowy path that carried Alice and Jack away. After a moment she moves to her chair at the head of the table, and Alyssa notices for the first time that she favors her right leg a little, relies on the cane to keep her balance.

She looks— _haggard,_ now, as she drops into her chair. Her pallor seems more pronounced, less perfect marble than the dead white of a corpse; a feverish sheen glazes her eyes, and the skin around them has taken on a sickly reddish tinge.

She jumps as if stung when Morris stamps his foot on the table. "Hatter?"

"Morris," she says, in the same empty tone from before, focusing—with effort, Alyssa thinks—on his face. "Yes?"

He indicates the hat and the abundance of cards threatening to spill out of it. "Shall we proceed?"

Her gaze oozes from him to Alyssa. For an instant, there's a spark of hesitation in her eyes, as if her sadism evaporated with Alice's departure. Then she tilts her head to the side, and everything _human_ in her expression vanishes behind a cold, expressionless mask. "Do."

Alyssa snatches a quick breath to steel her nerves, squares her shoulders, and then Morris draws the first card from the hat and it begins:

"She's childish… She's too trusting… She's willful! She doesn't think things through—!"

Morris marches along the table as he reads, grinning his knifelike grin and tossing each card over his shoulder to be snatched and squabbled over by the snickering guests; Alyssa grips the armrests and stares hard at the treetops lining the clearing. _Sticks and stones. It's just words. I can do this._

"—Petulant! Greedy! Doesn't know whom to trust—!"

 _I don't care. I don't care. None of these people know me. I don't care._

"—Cowardly! She's too short—!"

"What?! Why does that even _matter?!_ "

A couple of the guests cackle, and one of them repeats her question in a mocking sing-song before collapsing into giggles. Morris rifles through the hat with a little more care then before, whips out another two cards, and bellows, "Can't take criticism! Doesn't listen to friendly advice!"

"Grow bigger!" somebody shrieks, and the Hatter smiles in a slow, predatory way while several of the guests scream with laughter. Alyssa feels her shoulders trying to hunch, her spine trying to curl, and forces herself to stay still.

 _I don't care. I don't care!_

"Desperate for attention! She has an inflated view of her own importance!"

"That's one of _mine!_ "

"She's full of herself!"

"Self-centered!"

"Self-absorbed!"

"Self- _pitying!_ "

"Self—"

"Can it!" Morris kicks a tray of finger sandwiches into the laps of the interruptors, who subside into snickering as he passes them by. "She can't recognize truth when it's staring her in the face—can't stand up for herself—can't tell her friends from her enemies—can't open doors—doesn't know when to quit!"

Alyssa grits her teeth. The scathing volley comes faster and faster as Morris begins to draw cards out of the hat by the fistful, and the howling laughter of the guests is beginning to drown out the _I don't care_ chant—because the truth is she _does_ care, and the jeering and jibes are digging under her skin and curdling in her stomach like rancid, boiling poison.

Worst of all is the Hatter, gazing serenely across the table as if daring her to cry. Alyssa doesn't dare look her in the eye.

"She wants everyone else to feel sorry for her! She's stuck-up! Doesn't say what she means _or_ mean what she says! Hopeless! Naive! Maladjusted! She's—"

" _Stop it!_ "

And they do, though the sudden silence feels more like a trap waiting to be sprung than a reprieve. Alyssa shudders into it, digging her fingernails into the stuffing of the armrests until she hits the solid wood of the frame beneath. Bitter, humiliated tears sting her eyes, but she clamps her eyelids shut before they can fall.

"Stop." A whisper, this time, halting and frail. Every scrap of strength she has left is pouring into holding back the tears, leaving none leftover for her voice. "This is _insane._ What the _fuck_ are any of you getting with this?"

The silence sharpens until Alyssa can feel it like needles against her skin. A threat. A warning. She dares to lift her head and open her eyes, to meet hostile smirks and open derision with a watery glare of her own. "I thought this was a place of power," she says—still trembling, still a whisper, but growing stronger when nobody shouts her down. "A political institution and a hub of trade, demanding respect, admiration, and fear."

Somebody titters. Alyssa doesn't bother trying to see who; she lifts her chin and, for the first time since the Game began, looks straight at the Hatter.

The Hatter smiles coldly back at her.

Alyssa sets her jaw and refuses to let it rattle her. "But really, you're just a bunch of petty, stupid bullies who stumbled into power by accident. And someday soon, it's all going to come tumbling down."

She isn't sure what possesses her to stand, chin high and shoulders square, but it happens and for the first time since she set foot in the Hatter's territory, she feels certain of her way. "I don't like bullies," she says. "I came here to ask for an invitation to your citadel, but now? I wouldn't accept one even if you offered." _Sorry, Morpheus._ "If you ever feel like acting like an adult, and apologizing, well—you know where to find me. Until then: _Fuck_ you."

And then she turns on her heel, not waiting to see the Hatter's reaction, heedless of the laughter and mocking imitations breaking out behind her back, and clambers off the table, and limps back the way she came.

 _Alice was right. The Hatter never would've invited me to her citadel, and there's nothing to be gained from letting assholes be assholes._

 _But Morpheus will be angry._

For a moment, she thinks of the venomous rage he exhibited when he heard she'd lost the fulgurite, and a quaver of uncertainty slows her steps. An ignorant mistake is one thing; deliberately disregarding his instructions is another.

She keeps going.

 _Let him be angry. We can figure out another way._

* * *

Three meandering paths through seemingly endless, identical trees and a growing suspicion that she's traveling in circles later, Alyssa's righteous anger is spent and she's running on grim fumes—only the thought of what could happen to her if she's still lost in the Hatter's territory come nightfall keeps her exhaustion at bay.

This forest had felt bright and welcoming as she approached the Tea Party. She had followed a broad path through mossy trees whose entangled canopies cast dappled shadows across the leafmold and protected her from the broiling heat of Wonderland's sun; here and there had been unassuming thickets dripping with swollen red berries, or riotous sprays of flowers sunning themselves drowsily in the wide spaces between the trees. There had been songbirds trilling sweet melodies overhead, and bright-eyed squirrels with shining russet fur darting back and forth across the path.

A perfect fairytale forest. Something out of a children's storybook.

An illusion. A lie.

Now, the paths are unkempt and winding, strewn with fallen branches and prickly overgrowth. Wizened trees with twisted trunks and tangled branches blot out the sun altogether, leaving her shrouded in a disquieting gloom. Barbed thorns and brambles have replaced the cheerful berry thickets, and flower patches have given way to little silver-green mushrooms with an evil luminescence.

Her knee hurts.

Just ahead, the faint trail she's been following for the last little while arrives at a juncture with a second path, wider and better kept than her own. A decrepit wooden signpost is hammered into the earth at the crossroads; Alyssa has to lean close and squint to read the faint letters scratched into the rotting wood.

To the right: _CARTHAMIN ESTATE._

And to the left: _NORTHWOOD WARREN._

That settles the matter in Alyssa's mind, for Morpheus had mentioned Northwood Warren as the Hatter's staunch ally. She stretches, buoyed by hope that she might at last be headed in the proper direction, and takes the righthand path.

It weaves in a dizzy sort of way through the dense trees; then the suffocating gloom fades as dim rays of sunshine begins to pierce the canopy once more. Alyssa hurries on, eager to escape the darkness.

After a while she comes to a place where the trees _stop,_ with an abruptness that seems artificial, giving way to what at first appears to be a featureless white plane. Blank white paper in the middle of a richly painted canvas.

Only it isn't blank: as her eyes adjust to the sudden glare, the flat white becomes a smooth, mossy field—radiant as fresh snow under the sunlight, with shadows of palest blue plucking out the faintly rippled topography of the ground beneath. Slender trees with long, trailing branches and translucent leaves grow out of the colorless expanse in orderly rows.

In the distance, Alyssa can just see the ridged outline of a roof, its copper shingles crawling with verdigris.

 _Carthamin Estate._

It stirs her memory a little, now that she is here; Morpheus showed it to her once. Something about gardens, and ghosts, and lost things…

Shaking her head at the misty remembrance, Alyssa steps out of the trees. The mossy lawn feels firm and springy beneath her feet, though water begins to seep out of it as she progresses further into the white expanse. A delicately sweet scent gilds the air. Welcome relief after the damp and rot of the forest.

The silence is absolute. Not a single note of birdsong, nor the animal rustlings that followed her through the forest, nor even a stirring of the whiplike branches of the orchard in a breeze.

A deep sense of calm steals over her as she approaches the orchard trees. Wrapped in warm sunlight and sweet air, free at last from the claustrophobic shadows of the forest, she feels her anxiety sloughing away. The thick carpet of moss absorbs it as it does the sound of her footsteps. Her heart slows to a languid beat, and Alyssa finds her own movements slowing to match.

The sun hangs high overhead. Plenty of time to find her way out of the forest.

Or perhaps she'll stay here, in this vast open space, and wait for Morpheus to find her.

Yes, she likes that idea; it feels safer than venturing again into the gloomy maze encircling the estate, where she might wander into some overgrown thicket and never be found again or, worse, be found by the Hatter.

The orchard trees flutter in an imperceptible breeze, brushing their boughs back and forth across the ground. Their translucent leaves glitter like drops of glass in the sunlight, casting flecks of rainbow light in flickering halos around their trunks.

Alyssa has vague thoughts of passing through the orchard and presenting herself at the house, to inquire for help from whatever inhabitants she finds within, but she is not quite halfway there when exhaustion overtakes her. One moment she is ambling along; in the next, she finds herself drifting to her knees, her eyelids very heavy.

She is _so_ tired…

Her body slumps. Damp, velvety moss cushions her cheek as she lies down, and in her ears she hears the melodic tinkling of wind chimes, and then her eyes close and sleep rolls sweetly over her.

* * *

Shock of cold water on her face. Alyssa chokes, splutters, coughs—and then a glass is held to her lips and she hears somebody ordering her to drink.

Warm, syrupy liquid sloshes over her chin.

Foul taste. Cold fingers against her throat, rubbing.

Blurry, searing light and charred shadows.

" _Idiot girl!_ "

Hissing, hissing, flecks of spittle on her cheek. She knows that voice.

High. Cold.

Why can't she see?

Again the glass is brought to her lips. Her tongue feels too big in her mouth. Swollen. The horrible liquid oozing over it.

Blink. Blink blink blink. Slow.

Blue eyes, bright eyes. Bright looming furious blue eyes…

Serrated thorns in her flesh. A steady burn roaring hotter, hotter.

Alyssa wails. Fire ripples through her veins, and a sticky, warm wetness plasters her dress to her back. The Hatter—for it _is_ the Hatter, sneering down at her where she lays on the grass—presses her lips together and forces more foul-tasting syrup down her throat. She struggles, tries to struggle, but her limbs flop uselessly and whips of fire rake across her back.

"Lie _still,_ you fool," the Hatter snarls.

Her head is full of smoke and her guts are full of slivered glass. The muscles in her back spasm, ripping her spine into a painful arc, and Alyssa screams.

Then…

She isn't sure.

The world is suddenly cast all in silver, and there is no more light and yet she _sees:_ dark sap coursing through translucent trees, and long metallic grass reflecting a black and starless sky, and within the blackness are lightless galaxies of dust and ice and wind, worlds of churning endless seas and barren windswept stone.

And the darkness melts, and the silver melts, all swirling together, and they sluice into her in a frothing, icy wave that extinguishes the wildfires in her blood.

She lies in a bed of ash, of molten lava cooled to harmless stone.

Perhaps she slips away, then, into the tender relief of sleep; or perhaps this is all a dream, and she still lies dozing beneath the drifting glass branches of the willow trees…

When she opens her eyes again, the Hatter is there beside her, and the sky is swollen and dark as an overripe plum.

And she _hurts._ Like a train ran her over.

Repeatedly.

The Hatter notices she's awake and tuts at her. "Decided to rejoin us in the land of the living at last, have you? No, don't speak—you stupid, _stupid_ girl. Unless it's to thank me for saving you from your own _idiocy._ "

"…Wh…?"

"Trundling into the heart of the tulgey grove like a little lost lamb to slaughter," the Hatter sneers. "What in the King's name were you _thinking?_ "

 _…Tulgey?_

No, no, that isn't right, _can't_ be. Because tulgey trees are—

"P… pink?"

The Hatter scoffs. "Pink, yes, once their sap mingles with the blood of their prey and the flowering starts. But before that—"

Another memory stings. Morpheus's voice, a lilting singsong. Alyssa mumbles along: "All that glitters will eat you."

This earns her an exasperated stare. "You knew that and _still_ laid down for the trees? A sharp blade would give you a nicer death, you know, if you're looking to die."

"Forgot…"

" _Forgot,_ " the Hatter mutters. She leans over, holds a little blue bottle to Alyssa's lips. "Drink. Again." When Alyssa presses her lips together instead, the Hatter sighs and adds, "Unless you'd rather marinate in tulgey toxins until the end of days. It's an _antidote,_ girl, not poison."

Toxins. Toxins toxins toxins. Right. Tulgey trees pump their victims full of a digestive neurotoxin that paralyzes them and eats them alive from the inside. Shivering, Alyssa gulps obediently and promptly gags. It's like drinking pureed hamburger.

Two swallows, and then the Hatter takes the bottle away.

Alyssa shuts her eyes and tries to ignore the nauseous bubbling in her stomach. The dull, hollow pounding between her temples. The way her limbs feel like rubbery sacks of lead, boneless, lifeless…

Ash and smoke and poison in her flesh.

And the Hatter saved her life. Saved her from a fate like Alice Liddell's.

Muzzily, Alyssa says, "Why?"

The Hatter chuckles. "Why not?" She brings the bottle to Alyssa's lips again, and this time, Alyssa drinks without being told. A few lumpy dregs tasting of old meat and sweaty cheese plop onto her tongue, and then nothing. The bottle's empty. She shudders and chokes it down, and the Hatter says, "I'm not the monster you think I am. And you're playing a more dangerous game than you know."

Little stinging pains trickle down her back like rain as her arm moves, and Alyssa opens her eyes. And there's her arm, the shredded scraps of her glove, hanging limp from the Hatter's grip a few inches above her face. Razor-thin lacerations criss-cross the tanned skin beneath. Deeper punctures where thorns punched deep into her flesh.

"A very dangerous game," the Hatter says again, softer. "Remember that."

She drops Alyssa's arm, letting it fall with a dull _thud_ onto her chest. A shadow passes through her eyes, and she cocks her head as if listening to something beyond Alyssa's hearing.

Then she smiles, slowly. It is not a nice smile.

"Ah," she murmurs. "It's time."

She locks her hand around the front of Alyssa's dress and _lifts_. Nausea and vertigo pounce, chopping Alyssa's startled cry of protest into a choked spasm that leaves her retching; glimpses of trees and grass and mud and flowing black water smear past her eyes as the Hatter hauls her into a more or less upright position. Her feet drag uselessly against the grass, and a few feeble stirrings of her arms are the most she can mount in self defense.

The Hatter moves briskly to the riverbank and holds her out over the water. Alyssa feels her feet slide off the bank and swing free through the air above the river's surface, and hysterical terror grips her in an instant.

She's a good swimmer, normally. When she isn't _paralyzed._

"Look at you," the Hatter says, as she surveys Alyssa through half-closed lids. If she struggles at all to keep her grip on Alyssa's squirming dead weight, she gives no sign of it. "All dressed up like the First Alice come again. When you see Morpheus next, remind him that _she_ wore her hair brown, and her dress yellow, and that nostalgia is just the lies told by unsatisfying present. Oh, and—"

Her free hand dips into her waistcoat, and emerges with—

 _…No. Oh, no, no—_

—an elongated chunk of sandstone, exploding into branches at one end. Shoelaces still wrapped tight around one end, Taelor's plain white and Alyssa's scarlet.

The fulgurite.

"—tell him _finders keepers_ for me," the Hatter breathes, and lets go.

Alyssa screams until cold water closes over her head, and the current sweeps her away.


	13. interlude: ripples

**AN:** this one isn't quite a chapter — more a collection of little scenes playing catch-up. also, i hope, an end to the months-long delay between updates thing. (sorry.)

reviews are appreciated, as always!

* * *

 **INTERLUDE.** _RIPPLES._

There are showers in Wonderland.

For some reason that's what Taelor's thoughts keep circling back to as she lays on a cot inside the watchtower. Wonderland has showers and all the other trappings of modern plumbing—and that means it isn't just a silly dream, isn't just a kid's story—that underneath all the weirdness and magic of it all, it's an actual place full of actual people living actual lives and—

It's _real._ It's all real.

This is real.

She feels sick.

Sleep eludes her, because when she closes her eyes, she sees the bloody mess of Alyssa's knee—the torn, blistered flesh edged in little curls of blackened skin—and then she starts thinking _what the_ hell _was in that water?!_ all over again, and if she dwells on that for too much longer, she's going to have to get up and take another shower.

God.

She's such a _mess._ Her life is _beyond_ in shambles. If they get out of Wonderland alive, she's going to _throttle_ Alyssa for dragging her into this bullshit quest.

And if they don't—

 _Don't think about that._

Huffing, Taelor rolls off the cot and tip-toes to the bathroom to scrub herself down for the sixth time, and then she returns to her room and curls up by the window to watch the slivered moon wheel across the sky until, at last, sheer exhaustion drags her down.

Gossamer wakes her in the morning with a shove, spilling Taelor onto the cold flagstones beneath the window. Her globular black eyes reflect nothing but innocence when Taelor splutters out, "What's your fucking _problem?_ "

"It's time," Gossamer replies, in a tinny voice cut with unmistakable hostility. "Dress. You will eat on the way."

Taelor grumbles under her breath as she gets to her feet, but doesn't waste time arguing. The owl in charge of Morpheus's watchtower—a plump woman with pale freckles spattered across milky-white skin and gorgeous brown eyes—had given her a disinterested once-over when Taelor arrived yesterday afternoon and then handed her off to Gossamer. Who, from what Taelor has gleaned, views her assignment to the watchtower as something of a punishment. Something something disagreements with precious _Morpheus._

Getting slapped with "babysitting" the spare Abovegrounder hadn't improved her attitude one bit.

The woman is a dragonfly, supposedly, but she puts Taelor more in mind of a praying mantis thanks to her buggy eyes, needle-sharp chin, and habit of folding her hands primly over her heart whenever she's displeased. Which is always.

At least Taelor gets a clean set of clothes out of the deal. Nothing fancy—loose trousers and a patchwork smock thing that fits her like a burlap sack—but better than another day in the muddy, salt-soaked clothes she'd fallen into Wonderland with.

Tripping over the overlong hems of the trousers, she follows Gossamer out of the watchtower, and then around the back.

The grass here grows almost as tall as Taelor and taller than Gossamer by at least five or six inches; it's a few minutes of practically _swimming_ through the stuff before they break out into a dry riverbed.

There's a rusted metal track set into the cracked earth, and on it a mining cart hitched to a fat, flea-bitten grey pony.

Taelor sighs. It's a hot, cloudless, gleaming morning, and there's not a scrap of cover over the cart; she can feel a premonitory itch of sunburn on the back of her neck already.

 _It's going to be a long ride._

* * *

The tense silence infecting Rethen House builds like the crackling pressure before a thunderstorm as Morpheus rips the cover off the mirror and slams his palms flat to the cool glass. He stares urgently through the empty parlor entrapped within the mirror; if only he searches _hard_ enough, maybe this time, _this time,_ he can summon his own reflection—

But of course he can't.

He's not had the luxury of a reflection since the night Queen Amaranth died.

A pang of longing courses through him. For the old days. For when he was naught but a jester in the true Queen's court. Things were simpler then.

 _Nothing was ever simple._

Morpheus rests his forehead against the mirror, between his splayed fingertips, and watches his breath fog the glass, and swallows his incipient panic.

Today had not gone well. He had searched the steaming husk of the Pool of Tears for hours without turning up any sign of the lost fulgurite—which had been enough to put him in a sour mood even _before_ he learned of the Alice who had appeared there, without warning, around daybreak.

 _And Alyssa has not returned._

He winces. In all honesty it is _that_ —not the lost fulgurite, not the wrench having an Alice in Wonderland again throws into his plans—that makes his heart pulse with such sickening strength in his throat now. Without her…

Without her.

There's a thought better left unfinished.

* * *

Hatter stands for a while on the bank of the Claret, gazing into water rendered opaque by the twilight with a vague feeling of nausea; afterward there is a dull smear in her memory which ends in the grey shadows of her old workshop. Muffling dust upon the floor. Emptied racks and abandoned shelves. Quiet, quiet, this once-hallowed place hollowed out when she moved to her citadel on the other side of the Glass.

The forlorn sadness of the place pierces her heart, and what bleeds out of the wound is boiling fury. She screams and the fulgurite flies from her hand, shatters with a phenomenal _BOOM_ against the cast iron vat in which she once dyed her hats.

In the ringing silence that follows, Hatter grips her cane and sways on the knife's edge between rage and grief—balanced, perfectly balanced, and yet every passing second severs another of the stitches holding her together. The neglected air feels like needles in her lungs.

"Hatter?"

 _Morris._ A careful whisper, accompanied by the _snick_ of a lamp and flood of coppery light; it's enough to knock Hatter from her precipice. A watery gasp escapes from her throat.

"I shouldn't be here," Hatter mutters, all but slapping the tears from her eyes. "The Queen—"

"Forget the Queen." She blinks and Morris is plucking at her elbow; Hatter allows herself to be led to the workbench in the corner, where Morris has set up a pair of stools and filled a little bowl with turmeric salve—an incandescent orange in the artificial light.

Hatter slumps down in front of it, and examines the warped wooden surface of the workbench while Morris peels her gloves away and begins to daub the salve onto her fingertips. The itchy burn in them cools a little beneath her touch.

"Wish you'd take better care of these," Morris mumbles, caressing her knuckles with a wistful sigh. Hatter manages a half-hearted smile.

"Not pretty enough for you, hm?"

"You know why," Morris replies, with a dour glance to show what she thinks of this pitiful attempt to tease.

"…I do."

It _frightens_ her, sometimes, how much Morris cares. How the regular indignities and irritations of Hatter's condition send her into agonies of worry, and all the more so because Hatter herself so rarely thinks of them. She closes her eyes, flexing her fingers against Morris's.

"Alice—" she begins, and then halts, for it seems all she wants to say is contained in those two loathsome syllables.

 _Alice, Alice, Alice, it always comes down to you._

"—I hate her," she snarls, and Morris goes very still. "I hate her, I _hate_ her, I _hate_ —"

Never in all her years of watching had she imagined the feeling of Alice in the flesh: of standing before her, and seeing and _being seen_ —

So soft. So bright. So _warm._ The quiet scent of apples still lingers in Hatter's nose—such a silly, foolish thing to smell of.

She hadn't imagined feeling—

 _Don't. Don't._

And she shoves that thought away, buries it with the other rotting things in the forbidden corners of her mind. It's easier, then, to breathe away the painful stuffiness in her chest and pretend the tears carving hot tracks down her face are somehow not—

 _Don't._

"She'll not find the Rabbit Hole tonight," Hatter says. Her voice quakes. "Wonderland isn't yet done with her. I can—"

The shudder begins in the pit of her stomach and rolls up through her spine, so deep even the marrow in her bones seems to tremble. She feels Alice like the ghost of a heartbeat, echoing strangely in her chest.

At last she dares to meet Morris's gaze, which has been steady on her face all this time. Care. Concern. Nothing of the disgust she still, after all these years, feels there ought to be. "I don't know what to do," she whispers.

Morris resumes her ministrations, slathering more of the salve onto the spidery cracks running across Hatter's palm. "I had a thought," she says, carefully, "while you were out chasing Morpheus's little pawn."

Something dangerous, from the caution in her tone. Something, Hatter suspects, that she will not like very much at all. Still—even that is better than the churning, directionless turmoil in her mind.

"I am… open to suggestions."

* * *

The golden afternoon passes into evening with unnatural speed, and by the time Henrietta leaves them on the outskirts of the forest, the sun is rubbing shoulders with the horizon and streaking fire across the sky. A spectacular sunset overshadowed by all the unspoken—

 _Just breathe._

Easier said than done. Alice's fingernails bite into her palms as she clenches her fists and then forces them to uncurl, slowly, slowly.

The forest gives way to open heath and the suggestion of ancient glaciers: boulders, some large as a house, others rising no higher than Alice's knees, lie strewn amid the scrub. Alice can just see the dark ribbon of a river to the east, and beyond that only shadows.

"Be dark soon," Jack says, the first he's spoken since the Tea Party. "We should find shelter for the night. Get some sleep."

Chewing her lip, Alice dares a sideways glance at him. His expression is composed in the careful way she's grown so used to seeing in the months since he lost his job and the— _problems_ —started, and she has to hold back a sigh.

Probably it's for the best. He's from Wonderland and she's been scoping out apartments, and with the way things have been going between them lately she's not keen to unpack either of their secrets.

 _Coward._

She schools her expression into neutrality and says, "I'd rather focus on getting home. Chloe—"

"Is with Mom," Jack says, "and time runs different in Wonderland. We're not going to—" He breaks himself off with a gusty sigh and, catching her eye, nods toward the river. "Walk and talk? I think we'll both feel better if we keep moving."

Alice nods, and together they begin to pick their way through the scrubland. Once they've settled into their pace, Jack continues, "Wonderland doesn't… like to interrupt the flow of time Up There."

"Which means…?"

"We're kinda on Narnia time, and Chloe will be fine."

She'll believe that once they're back home and Chloe is safely in her arms. Not that she disbelieves Jack, it's just…

"I—" Deep breath. Deep breath. "I keep thinking about Mom," she whispers. "And, and what happens to Chloe if we don't—"

Jack gathers her into a crushing hug before she can finish, and Alice locks her arms around his torso with equal fervor; with his chin nestled in her curls, she feels secure enough to release a shuddery whimper.

She'd lost both of her parents by the time she was Chloe's age: her father to complications of lifelong illness, her mother to the sudden senselessness of a traffic accident. She knows the pain of a parent never coming home again.

"That's not going to happen, Al," Jack says, firm.

 _You don't know that._

But it's soothing to hear it all the same. Alice leans against him, breathing in the faint woodsy smell of his soap for a moment, taking comfort in that familiarity.

Then, gripped by sudden urgency, she pulls back and peers anxiously up into his face. "I wasn't—I wasn't planning to _leave,_ " she says, tripping over the words in her haste. "With—I-I just—our apartment—it's too—" His eyebrows rise, and Alice gives herself a mental shake and starts over. "Looking at… cheaper apartments… it was just, sort of, it made me feel a little better about—"

"Money," he finishes.

"Money. Right."

True. Mostly true, and he does her the kindness of not asking why she was looking at a _studio_.

(How _had_ the Hatter known about that, anyway?)

"…How's your face?" she asks, once the silence stretches too long. In the failing light, it's impossible to see whether there's a bruise, but he winces when she lifts her hand to his jaw and the skin feels too warm beneath her fingertips.

"It's—"

His gaze shifts to something behind her, and Alice is still turning to see what it is when Jack swears under his breath and _throws_ himself into a dead sprint toward the river.

Alice doesn't question, doesn't keep squinting through the gloom to find whatever caught his attention. She races after him as fast as she dares on the uncertain terrain.

Halfway there, she sees the flash of a pale arm flopping for an instant above the water's surface, and fear jolts her to greater speed.

Jack hits the river and plunges in without breaking stride. Water sprays up around his knees, and Alice skids to a halt on the bank with her heart in her mouth as the current surges around his waist.

He dips down and scoops a limp body out of the water, cradling it— _her_ to his chest while she cries and coughs and—

And then Alice makes sense of the tattered dress and the waterlogged stream of long blonde hair, the petite frame and the familiar voice emerging from it in panicked, fractured sobs, and her blood runs cold.

 _Alyssa._

 _Oh, no._


	14. about to fly off into space

**THIRTEEN.** _ABOUT TO FLY OFF INTO SPACE._

Cold pierces bone. The riverbed is full of teeth: rough stone and biting weeds—

 _water in her mouth_

—and strange warmth; blood blossoms from her forehead, coloring the water with bitter taste and—

A twist of the current forces Alyssa's head above the surface, and she spits and gasps and tries to scream again before the river drags her back down. The need for more air strings a live wire through her chest.

— _burning._

Fading around the edges…

* * *

 _Wake up,_ she thinks. _Wake up wake up wake up_ —chanting with the shrill of her alarm. Fumbling hands through the darkness to reach it. Just a fragile veil of sleep between herself and Pleasance, where she'll crawl from her comfortable bed and reduce Wonderland to a bizarre nightmare—

 _Wake up!_

—but her body quakes, and cracks, and the mirage of normalcy evaporates.

Smoke in the wind.

She wakes up.

* * *

Dancing firelight jumbles her view into a nauseating jigsaw puzzle: fragments of sky and stone and smoke in a swirling dark kaleidoscope. Alyssa moans and shuts her eyes, but the bruised shadows behind her eyelids pulsate at the same sickening pace. She tastes bile. The stench of woodsmoke tickles her nose.

"Alyssa?"

A panicked gasp snags in her throat like a fishhook—but then the speaker goes on, softer and gentler, and her resemblance to the cold voice of the Hatter fades. "Alyssa, sweetie, can you hear me?"

Warm fingers smooth her hair away from her forehead as Alyssa reluctantly opens her eyes. Alice crouches in front of her now, cast in shadows, her dark curls limned with a crimson glow by the flames at her back.

Alyssa can feel her body twitching, little spasms, like a marionette having its strings plucked at random. She _aches._

"No," she rasps, and her throat burns.

A fleeting, sympathetic smile touches the corners of Alice's lips. She strokes Alyssa's hair again, murmuring, "How do you feel? You're looking pretty…"

 _Bad._ She can see it in the concern clouding Alice's face, and feel it in the cacophony of pains jostling for her attention. The hollow shuddering in her chest, the razor blade in her throat. Her muscles fraying like old rope coming unwound. The throbbing of her knee, and the stiff, stinging tightness seeping out of her burns…

Everything.

Tears, hot as blood and sharp as slivers of glass, fill her eyes. Alyssa sniffs, hard, not wanting to cry in front of—

"What happened?" Alice asks.

"The Hatter—"

 _The Hatter._ Callous and cruel and playing games Alyssa doesn't understand. Saving her life in one breath and trying to drown her in the next. And for _what?_ Whim? _Why not?_

 _When you see Morpheus next—_

She cracks. Her mouth falls open in a creaking wail, and all the tears sluice out in burning waves, and Alyssa clamps her trembling hands over her eyes while Alice draws her gently into a hug and makes soft, meaningless noises at her; and she cries, and cries, and cries.

 _Morpheus was wrong._

He underestimated the Hatter or overestimated Alyssa and in either case it's clear she isn't up for the job; in two days she's been doused in boiling water and cut and bruised and poisoned and nearly drowned as she stumbled after half-remembered lessons and bungled even the simplest tasks. She isn't Alison, isn't the girl he trained for three years to survive in this world—and for all his training, all her preparation, Alison's venture into Wonderland still ended with her almost-death.

So, really, what chance did Alyssa have?

 _I should never have come here._

Bored and unhappy in Pleasance High—that's where Alyssa belongs. Safe in a bland, sane world where she isn't anyone special and nobody expects more from her than good grades and oddball creativity.

She's no hero. She's barely even capable of _damsel in distress._

After some time the tears run dry and she slumps, exhausted and silent, in Alice's arms. And then, in fits and starts, her voice scraping and quaking over the words, she tells Alice everything: how the cryptic notebook in Alison's writing desk triggered a catastrophic avalanche of stupid, reckless mistakes that lured her to Wonderland, to Morpheus, to the Hatter. Her family lineage all tangled up with Queen Amaranth and Alice Liddell and the slow but inescapable dying she so idiotically believed she could fix…

Her voice is faded to ash by the time she's finished, and when Alice tucks a thin fleece blanket around her shoulders and tells her to sleep because things always seem better after a good night's rest, Alyssa is too exhausted to argue.

Sleep closes around her like a fist, and holds her fast.

* * *

Sound is the first sensation to return: the low crackling of the fire, and worried voices murmuring, their words obscured by the mournful wailing of cicadas and Alyssa's own ragged breathing. She lies very still, listening, and after a while her ears adjust to the background noises of a sleeping Wonderland and the voices slide into focus.

She hears Alice say, "I wish you'd just told me."

"How?" The second voice is lower, masculine, and hazily familiar; after a moment of sluggish thought Alyssa identifies it as belonging to Jack. He continues, "'Oh, by the way, Al, I'm from the Land Beyond the Looking Glass—' I'm sure that would've gone over well."

"I'd've believed you."

"Would you?"

" _Yes,_ " Alice says. "Not if you were glib about it, maybe, but—but please don't do the _you wouldn't've believed me if I told you_ thing. Give me more credit than that."

There's a long pause. The fire sizzles.

"Sorry," Jack says, and then, "After Mom and I made it Up There, it—the first couple years were horrible. We'd left our whole lives behind and _nothing_ Up There is like it is in the Glassland and I just felt so—there's a word down here that means the despair of knowing you're far from home and you've lost your way and mightn't ever get back. _Mome._ " He sighs. There's a slight rustle of cloth. "But by the time we met, well, I'd got my GED, gotten into college, I had a job… I was starting to feel like I'd finally caught up, you know? And I guess I wanted to—not _forget,_ but shut the door on Wonderland and get on with living." He chuckles, but there's little humor in it. "Should've known Wonderland's harder to escape than that."

A log falls, or maybe he or Alice stirs the fire; in any case there's a dull _thud_ and then a hissing sort of _pop,_ and the reddish light filtering through Alyssa's eyelids brightens for an instant.

"Did you know?" Alice asks, quietly.

"Know…?"

"That I'm—?"

"Oh. One of _those_ Alices? No. Wonderland hadn't—until now, I guess—had an Alice since before I was born, and it'd been even longer since one came through the Looking Glass to our side. So I didn't think about it much."

"Really?"

"Really. Used to be every seven years like clockwork, but the last one came back in the early seventies. Dunno why."

"Oh."

Again they fall silent, and the only sounds for a while are the spitting flames and the dreary song of the cicadas.

Alyssa feels vaguely that she ought to open her eyes and sit up into the lull of the conversation. She's made an awful mess of saving Wonderland, and what she needs now is to find Taelor and get both of them the hell _out_ before her own stupidity gets them killed. She doesn't have time to waste on eavesdropping—but exhaustion presses down on her like lead, and she stays put.

"You were gonna tell me how you know the Hatter," Alice says at length.

Alyssa shudders, every muscle in her body clenching with a terrified sort of anticipation as her stomach turns uncertainly; she hears Alice sigh. Warm hands brush against her back and tuck the blanket more snugly around her shoulders.

"Poor kid," Alice murmurs. Her hand comes to rest between Alyssa's shoulder blades and stays there, rubbing tiny, soothing circles.

"Hard to believe the Hatter—" Jack pauses, then clears his throat and mutters, "At least, when I knew her she'd never've…"

Rustling cloth, and then footfalls muffled against soft earth; wood knocks on wood, and the fire hisses and burns brighter through Alyssa's eyelids. A wave of sharper warmth rolls over her.

Slowly, Jack says, "Her name was Madara Corogarde. She was some sort of foundling, I think, and Red Queen Eris raised her up and made her a knight in the Red Cohort around the same time I was squired to the White Knight. Saw plenty of her during the games." The fire makes a coughing sound, then settles again with a crackle. "Didn't know her too well outside of that, but she was always… not nice, exactly, but personable. A bit quiet. I liked her well enough."

Alyssa shivers again. The hand on her back slows in its circuit, and Alice says, "She isn't like that anymore."

"No," Jack says. "No."

And then nothing. The fire burns and the cicadas drone, and Alice keeps on rubbing circles into Alyssa's back until all the tension in her body unwinds and the pain of her injuries diffuses into a foggy half-sleep; eventually Jack murmurs, "We should get some sleep. Be dawn in a few hours…"

Alyssa isn't quite sure what happens after that; she has vague impressions of movement and sound, and the rosy glow behind her eyelids fades into reddish shadow, and the air grows colder. Perhaps she sleeps again, and perhaps time, or Time, just slides away from her for a little while…

…But when she next opens her eyes, the world is flooded with watery grey light and the campfire is burnt down to charcoal and white ash. She's sore all over, and a dull headache throbs between her temples, but on the whole it's an improvement over last night.

Groaning, Alyssa pushes herself up on her forearms to look around.

There's the dead campfire before her, smoldering in a muddy fire pit bordered by smooth river stones. The Stetsons lie beyond that, still asleep, huddled together beneath another blanket like the one draped over Alyssa's lap and half-hidden by long grass.

They're in a little stand of slender aspens, whose variegated trunks give the unsettling impression of dark eyes staring out in all directions. Pale mist curls between their trunks. Far above, the trees unfold into crests of emerald leaves, which seem all the brighter against the overcast backdrop of the sky.

It's eerily still.

Not a breath of wind to stir the treetops nor ruffle the wind; not a trill of birdsong or hum of the cicadas to greet the morning, only the faint echo of her own pulse in her ears and, somewhere to her right, the quiet burble of flowing water.

Alyssa pushes the blanket away and staggers to her feet. Her mouth feels like it's coated in ashes—a thirst powerful enough to defeat her fear. She turns and totters toward the sound of the river, and it isn't long before the mist parts and she finds herself at the muddy bank of a broad ford. Upstream, the river narrows and deepens—the water deepening to a dark, unpleasant green—but here it flows no deeper than Alyssa's ankles.

Relieved, she wades in and, trying hard not to think about what bacteria might lurk in Wonderland's streams, scoops herself a few mouthfuls of cold, clear water.

Halfway through her third drink, it occurs to her that the ache radiating through her body is the _wrong_ sort of pain: not the gnawing hurt of injuries stacked upon injuries, but the familiar soreness of the morning after a good hard workout.

Baffled, Alyssa tugs off her gloves—little more than blood-stained rags, now—and gapes at her skin. Faint white scars twine around her arms like vines encircling a tree; pale starbursts mark the places where tulgey thorns tore deeper into her flesh.

She scrambles backwards and half-falls onto the muddy bank; hands trembling, she tugs at the bindings around her knee until the bandage unravels into her waiting palms—revealing a crescent of ruddy keloid puckering the skin just above her kneecap.

Next she tugs at the tattered silk of her dress, craning her neck to peer down at her chest—and there, where yesterday her skin was puffy and red from burns, there's nothing but pale, rippling scars.

She's healed.

Alyssa sags back against the riverbank, shoving her tangled hair out of her face and staring wildly out over the water.

 _Am I dead? Did I die—?_

Terror paralyzes her for an instant, frozen by the horrible thought that she might've died in her sleep only for Wonderland to revive her as it had Alice Liddell, that she might now be trapped forever—

She clamps a hand over her mouth to strangle her fear.

 _There has to be another explanation._

Frantic, she flips through her memories of the past few days—Wonderlanders heal in strange ways, she knows that from the half-remembered lectures of her childhood; and Ivory had done something of that nature to her knee the night before last, hadn't she? Rituals somewhere between medicine and magic, water and iron and—and there's the foul curative the Hatter forced down her throat last night, which Alyssa had assumed a mere antidote for the poison of the tulgey trees—but for all she knows, it was more thorough in its healing…

 _Just breathe,_ she tells herself. _Just breathe._

But thoughts of what will happen if she really is trapped here by her own mortality rise in her mind anyway; she imagines a faceless Wonderlander crawling up the Rabbit Hole to take her place, playing at her life—imagines a stranger wearing her skin to school, to Underland, to Butterfly Threads, imagines Jenara and Jeb and Dad and maybe even Taelor living their lives in blissful ignorance of the imposter in their midst—imagines, worse, what will happen if she simply never comes home, and everyone forever wondering what happened to her—imagines _herself,_ growing older in Wonderland, cut off from all she loves.

Would this nightmarish land turn her vicious and uncaring as it had done to Madara Corogarde? Would she rot away and die with it, victim to the taint she can't stop?

Panic bends her double. She gulps and splutters for air as she presses her forehead into her knees, her fingers still clamped over her mouth, her heart galloping in her chest.

She sits like that for a long while, cold water rushing past her ankles and the cold damp from the riverbank creeping through her dress, choking a little with each breath because her lungs seem unwilling to expand; then she sees a strange flash of gold in the corner of her eye and shakily lifts her head.

The sun is rising.

The tightness in her chest eases, because the sun is rising and it makes the river glint like polished glass, save for the bands of rich, clear green where the long shadows of the aspen grove fall across the water. Bright rays of fresh sunshine spear the mist, suffusing the grey air with gold radiance and crowning the treetops across the river with shimmering glories.

Her mouth falls open.

Even as she watches, the flat clouds overhead peel away to reveal a pink sky darkening to violet at its zenith. Sunlit warmth breaks over her head and spills swiftly down her back and over her limbs until there's no trace of morning chill left, and as the last shreds of mist fade away the forest on the other side of the river seems to shiver—treetops rippling and giving flight to a flock of little brown birds, tall grasses swaying and sighing as they turn the flat sides of their blades toward the sun—as if the land itself is roused by the dawn.

It's impossible to panic in the face of such beauty, and all the fear she felt before rolls into a sorrowful little ball and hangs itself from her heart. Maybe she can't go home, but at least—at least—at least…

Wiping at her eyes, Alyssa gets to her feet and clambers up the riverbank, slipping a little in the mud and dewy grass.

She's just crested the bank when a voice calls out behind her, "Wait! Wait, señorita, _wait!_ Can I get a lil' help over here, please?"

She turns.

The caller is a small man who perches, wobbling, on a tiny protrusion of rock at about the halfway point of the ford. His brown skin gleams copper in the sunlight, and he's wearing a pale three-piece suit and matching trilby that would be very flattering if it weren't for the kitschy tiger stripe pattern. A long brown tail lashes through the air behind him as he fights to keep his balance.

"Um," Alyssa says. He waves merrily at her.

"¡Hola!" he shouts. "I suppose you are wondering how I ended up in this predicament, yes?"

"Um," Alyssa says again. "Yes?"

"Well you see—" A wave slops over his rock, and he yelps and hops to avoid it, his arms pinwheeling wildly "—I was in a bit of a rush, because I have been out all night looking for the Rabbit Hole—only I jumped a little bit too far, and now I'm a little—stuck."

"It—it isn't deep," Alyssa says weakly. "The river, I mean."

Gasping, he clutches at his chest and cries, "But I am _El Gato!_ I laugh in the face of danger, but water is—señorita, it is _wet._ "

And he looks so hopelessly miserable that Alyssa can't help feeling sorry for him. She says, "You say you jumped there, right?"

"Sí."

"So can't you jump back out?"

El Gato gives an awkward cough. "The Claret flows south," he says, with such glum finality that Alyssa decides not to ask for further clarification. But the phrase does tickle something in the back of her mind, and after a second of thought she remembers. Fresh hope dawns like the sunrise, sudden and quick, and she grins.

"This is the Claret River, you say?"

"…Sí, yes?"

He watches with a funny mixture of befuddlement and gratitude as she skids back down the riverbank and sloshes toward him. Once she gets near enough, Alyssa holds out her arm and says, "I—I've been asked to find a piece of iron in these waters. If I help you out of the river, will you help me look?"

She expects El Gato to take her hand, but instead he squints at her—his eyes are a dark grey, with slitted pupils—and then rolls his neck and shrugs his shoulders and glides with effortless grace into the body of a cat. Alyssa has to bite her lip to hide her amusement, for his creamy coat is downy fuzz, not fur, and sticks out in all directions. He looks for all the world like someone took a Siamese cat and sheared it like a sheep.

He flicks his tail and leaps before Alyssa can stoop to pick him up, landing with a thump on her shoulder, his hind legs scrabbling for purchase against her back. Once he finds his balance he settles against Alyssa's neck and begins to purr.

"…This isn't… really what I meant," Alyssa says weakly.

Still purring, El Gato says, "There's iron a little upstream, yes? Look along the banks and please— _try_ not to splash."


	15. leave the filigree behind

**FOURTEEN.** _LEAVE THE FILIGREE BEHIND._

The hot, swampy winds that blow forever over the southeastern peninsula of Wonderland nearly bowl Morpheus over as he emerges from the protective cover of the Radicarian Forest. Disgruntled, he flaps himself out of the moth form and pauses there, in the shadows of the trees, to strip—leaving his fine jacket and waistcoat hanging in the branches, and hopping a little as he removes his boots and stockings—until he's in naught but breeches and a loose linen shirt already plastered to his back by the humidity.

He plucks at the shirt as he follows the faint track through the brush down to the briny shore, which is grey and sullen and boiling as ever. Salt-stained planks dug into the wet sand make for a lonely boardwalk, stretching on and on to the great green hump of the tea farms in the distance.

By now Morpheus is thoroughly drenched, his hair snaking out of its ponytail and clinging with itchy persistence to his forehead. The sweltering air is wet enough to pass for soup, and even this gentle exertion leaves him panting.

As he trudges along the boardwalk, he fishes one of the hailstones from the Albicant Waste out of his pocket and crushes it against his forehead. The wintry cold trapped within escapes in a swirl of icy air, which cools his brown and offers fleeting relief from the stultifying heat.

Then it fades, and he plods on. The steaming waves of the Boiling Sea hiss as they ooze up and down the beach. Gusts of hot, sticky air smear a film of slippery, salty grime on his face as they slide past.

* * *

Two dozen hailstones cracked open against his face and chest and neck brings him to the foot of the Quaer Mountains, which rise out of the beach in gentle slopes long since worn into indolence by rain; they are covered all over with tea fields and glow a lurid green in the sunlight.

Clustered in the shadow of the mountains are the low-slung bungalows where the tea farmers live, and _there_ is Morpheus's quarry: Lounging in the shaded porch of a bungalow with a pipe in hand. Xe wears an oversized suit of the sort that suggests lazy opulence rather than a poor tailor; it's not baggy so much as _slouched._

"Nice weather," Morpheus wheezes as he squelches onto the porch.

"You're underdressed, Cousin," the Caterpillar observes.

Grunting, Morpheus flops down next to him. Shade makes no difference in the temperature here, but the flagstones are cut from northern granite and remain resolutely cool; he lies back and sighs as the chilly stones bleed some of the heat away. "Metamorphosis turns us to wilting flowers in the heat," he mutters, shaking his head. "But how goes it with you, Cousin?"

The Caterpillar chuckles. "I'm not planning on cocoons any time soon," xe says, and puffs on the pipe. "Rest easy on that."

Rolling his eyes, Morpheus says, "I meant, what brings you to Radicari? Running from rain on Isle Rilchiam?"

"Monsoon season's over," the Caterpillar replies blandly. "No, no, you know how it is—you've got your Alice and I've got mine."

Morpheus props himself up on one elbow and stares hard at xem for a moment. The Caterpillar is difficult to read at the best of times, and now xyr handsome black face is as inscrutable as Morpheus's missing reflection—so disinterested xe might as well still be talking of the weather.

 _Whose side are you on?_ he wants to ask. _What are you after?_ —But the Caterpillar would only laugh if he did, or else give a singularly useless answer like _Mine._

Last he checked, the Caterpillar was no friend of the Hatter's, but…

"Fine," he says at last. "I _am_ here about Alices, or more specifically about _Alyssa._ She didn't return from the Tea Party last night."

"I'd imagine she got lost," the Caterpillar drawls. "In that big old forest? Easy to get turned around, 'specially with her not being the Alice Wonderland wants." Puffing once more on the pipe, xe shifts to gaze out over the beach, humming something atonal and unpleasant to xemself. "Or it might be the Hatter got her," xe adds after a moment. "Or got _to_ her, if you know what I'm saying. Strange place to send her, the Tea Party."

"You sent _yours,_ " Morpheus says.

"Alice woulda found her way to the Tea Party whether I sent her there or not. All I did was hurry things along."

Morpheus snorts. "Didn't know you set any store by—"

"Oh, it's not about the Writings," the Caterpillar says, with a rumbling amusement that makes Morpheus grind his teeth together. "Nah. Our Alice isn't a regular sort of Alice, but she does have to find herself—and the Tea Party's part of that." Pausing, xe dips xyr head to look sideways at Morpheus, xyr brows furrowing. "You know who she is? _What_ she is?"

"She's late," Morpheus says tartly. "And overstaying her welcome."

"Might be she's right on time," the Caterpillar replies. "Don't get so stuck on how it's been that you lose track of what is _now_."

"…Do you know where Alyssa went or not? I'm in rather a rush."

" _Hmmmmm._ " The Caterpillar removes the pipe from xyr mouth and blows a long stream of blue smoke into the wind so that it gets carried off down the shoreline in a serpentine trail. "Last I heard she'd wandered off. But as you're in a hurry, you oughta ask the Rabbit—he was there, you see."

Groaning, Morpheus peels himself off the porch and gets to his feet. "Unhelpful as ever, Cousin," he says dryly, and in the privacy of his mind adds, _More so than usual, in fact._

The Caterpillar grins, waving him off with a lazy flick of xyr wrist, and Morpheus scowls at nothing and makes to leave.

"Morpheus," the Caterpillar says, just as his foot hits the boardwalk.

He turns. "What?"

The Caterpillar gazes solemnly down at him and says, "If you can't see what's in front of you, you need to look again. Be _careful,_ Cousin."

"Always the cryptic last word," Morpheus snaps.

"Not so cryptic." Another plume of smoke streams away in the wind. "Get on, now. Time's a'runnin', after all."

And that's the end of that.

His irritation builds as he slogs back down the boardwalk, the bristling darkness of the Radicarian growing ever taller ahead of him. The Caterpillar likes to dole information out in unsatisfying crumbs, always ever so pleased by xyr own superior knowledge—but most of the time, xe shares more generously among family.

Not so today. No, exchanges like this—when the Caterpillar hints and chuckles and refuses to give a straightforward answer—force Morpheus to wonder whether xyr recalcitrance is more ignorance than ego—for it can't be that the Caterpillar doesn't _care._ After all it was xe who first identified the source of their troubles, and xe who counseled Morpheus on the surest way to fulfill the decree Queen Amaranth laid upon him all those years ago…

 _Ask the Rabbit. He was there._ Morpheus scoffs to himself.

Of all the useless advice…

Still it is better than nothing, and when he reaches the Radicarian he collects his things from the trees and strides into the forest with a purpose greater than winging his way back to Rethen House. Ten minutes of brisk walking through the lush tropical foliage brings him to the pebbly shores of Lake Quaeritate, where glacial runoff from the north licks at the tree roots and transforms the Radicarian from a steaming jungle to a forest of austere conifers. Even the air tastes different here, exchanging the bitter tang of sea salt for the bracing sweetness of pine sap.

Morpheus sloshes into the cool water, shirt and breeches and all, to wash away the sweat and grime of south Radicari; then he braids his hair, wrings out his shirt until it is more or less dry, and makes himself presentable again.

Once he is dressed he orient himself to the north and slides, like a needle piercing cloth, out of Wonderland and into the Dark Country.

Most say that the Dark Country is Nothing and Nowhere, but Morpheus prefers to think of it as _Outside:_ beyond all notions of space, where even Time fears to tread and Wonderland itself lies rolled up like a forgotten tapestry.

And though the Dark Country strikes him blind and deaf and mute, he can _imagine_ his hands feeling carefully over the backing of that tapestry, tracing tangled threads that would, viewed from within, resolve into coherent images.

 _Here_ is the wrinkle where the silver Quaeritate meets the mottled green Radicarian, and _here_ are the imposing black walls of Castle Argine. Miles away from each other by foot or by wing, but from here—with the very fabric of reality folded in the lap of his mind—so close he can pinch the two of them together with his thumb and forefinger.

And out he slips, tugged through the space between and emerging into a blast of freezing wind that knocks him back into the high stone walls, his feet dancing for purchase on an icy ledge no wider than the breadth of his hand. He has come out along the castle's northern flank, and he toes a sheer drop of two or three hundred feet to an untouched snow field, and then the long white spine of the Aceldama Mountains winding in serpentine ridges to meet the horizon.

Morpheus bares his teeth to the frozen air and laughs.

Then, because he is damp and already bristling with frost in the thin, cold air, he sets his shoulders more firmly against Argine's walls and tip-toes hurriedly east, into the wind.

In but a moment his long braid has become a solid icicle, and his wet clothes begin to crackle with every movement as he creeps along. He's shivering by the time he finds the postern half-buried in the snow drifted up against the north-east wall.

Muttering curses on the Queen for holding court at this desolate altitude and on the Rabbit for serving at her beck and call, Morpheus burrows into the snow and gives the old oak door a glare so furious that it squeaks in fright and springs open for him without a word. From there it's a short climb with the walls scraping at his shoulders as he fumbles his way up stairs worn smooth by centuries of feet—though _stairs_ is perhaps too generous a term, for the steep incline forces him to crawl.

At the top of the stairs is an iron grate, and—though Morpheus cannot see it from this angle—he knows the little gatehouse atop the postern will not be left unmanned. Queen Irmhilde is silly but not stupid enough to leave her back door unguarded.

Morpheus drums his fingers against the uppermost step, lips pursed.

 _Ah, well._

He sinks into an awkward crouch on the stairs and arches his back. Transformation is tricky from a standstill, but he manages it alright; and as a moth he's small enough to slip between the bars and dark enough to be invisible when he crawls along the rough black stones of Argine's walls.

Infiltrating the castle this way does mean a long, cold walk, but his fur will keep him warmer than the damp clothes.

* * *

Argine is an old castle with a well-fortified keep, but even the best defenses are worthless for keeping out insects. Morpheus allows himself to feel smug about this as he crawls through an arrow loop and into the abandoned bedroom on the fifth floor.

It isn't much warmer inside than out, for this room hasn't been used in over a hundred years—the illusion of unbroken stone Morpheus wove into the door long ago sees to that.

With a twitch of his wings, he shakes himself out of the moth form and touches down in the center of the little room. Dust smothers the floorboards and furniture and even the plastered walls, painting the whole room a uniform grey; it strikes him as being a trifle sad.

This was his room, once, when he was a jester in Queen Amaranth's court. But he hasn't had occasion to visit Argine in a long, long time.

Dust puffs up around his toes as he crosses the room to the washbasin—which is filled with dust and a couple of dead flies—and yet more dust blooms into an eye-watering cloud when he plucks at the rotting burlap pinned to the wall above the basin.

But the mirror— _oh,_ the _mirror!_

It shines perfect and clear and bright as its cover slips away, and in its reflection the neglected dust shines like polished silver. Morpheus touches his fingertips to the brass frame, reverent.

The mirror ripples gently as he lifts his hand to the glass itself, and he dives into the silvery mist on the other side.

Not many mirrors in Argine, for Queen Irmhilde is ever wary of spies, and so Morpheus flits down a shadowy tunnel with few points of egress: a gleaming spearpoint, a polished copper pan…

The White Rabbit keeps a little hand mirror tucked under his pillow—not the most secret of places for contraband in the Queen's castle, but then again who would suspect treachery from the cowardly little ball of fluff? Certainly not Queen Irmhilde.

It's a bit claustrophobic, of course, climbing out of an opening no bigger than his hand. Morpheus bats the pillow out of his face and writhes and squirms until at last he slithers the rest of the way out. His feet have just swung free when he hears a horrible _snap._

He snatches up the mirror and groans. Spiderweb cracks break the mirror's reflection into a dozen pieces; the force of his exit shattered the glass.

 _No getting back that way._

Scowling, Morpheus shoves the mirror back under the pillow and plants himself at the foot of the Rabbit's bed to wait.

Five minutes, ten, _thirty_ —and at last the Rabbit returns, muttering indecipherably under his breath as he slams the door behind him, slumps against it, and rubs vigorously at his face.

"Good afternoon," Morpheus says.

The Rabbit screams.

Morpheus lunges across the room to clap a hand over his mouth, which does nothing to deaden the sound. "Quiet! Quiet, fool, it's me!"

The Rabbit goes on screaming for another few seconds before subsiding with a whimper. He shoves at Morpheus's chest and collapses, landing with a loud _thud_ and burying his face in his hands. "You can't _do_ that!" he moans. "My people are a burrowing race! And a universal food source! I have a weak heart!"

Sighing, Morpheus crouches next to him. "You work for the _Queen of Hearts,_ do you not?"

"Only because I'm too terrified to say no!"

"And yet that isn't a job for the faint of heart," Morpheus says, clapping him on the shoulder. "I daresay yours has a few more years in it yet, burrowing race or no. Listen—have you seen Alyssa?"

The Rabbit spreads his fingers and peers between them with one baleful pink eye. "You should apologize," he says dourly. "Sneaking into a fellow's room like that—no invitations—no knocking—my poor _heart_ —"

"To the boojums with your heart, Rabbit! _Where is Alyssa?"_

" _I_ don't know," the Rabbit mutters. "She stormed off somewhere."

"…Stormed…?"

"Did _you_ tell her to say 'fuck you' to the Hatter? And call her a bully and all that? Because she did."

Morpheus rocks back on his heels until the ground catches him and drags a hand across his jaw. "Bloody hell."

And that's the last word he gets on the matter, because the door flies open again and a trio of armored Hearts burst inside to determine the cause of the screaming and, given the choice between iron shackles and having one of them lop his head off right there, Morpheus picks the shackles.

As they haul him down to the dungeons, Morpheus closes his eyes and curses reckless _children_ who cannot follow instructions as the embers of his last, most fragile hope flicker and die.


End file.
